Cultural institutions are established to fulfil three major functions: creating, promoting and protecting culture. Of those three the main function of cultural centres is promotion. Unfortunately, the latest studies show that those centres do not pay enough attention to older people who have a lot of free time and are financially stable.
It is important for cultural centres’ workers, who create curricula for their facilities, to take into consideration the recipients, their needs, interests, how much time and money they can spend in the cultural centre. Information about offered classes should get to those recipients in the right way and on time. The elements change depending on the recipients’ age. Adults are more aware of their interests than teenagers or children, therefore it is essential for the cultural centres to consider their needs in the curriculum.
Unfortunately, adults and especially older people are very rarely active in social and cultural life. They prefer to spend their free time in passive or even monotonous way. It is probably due to a lack of a proper “preparation” to the old age. The preparation should begin from the youngest age and should include five fields of activity: biological, psychological, intellectual, social and economic.
In order to ensure the right way of preparation, both cultural institutions and their recipients should increase the amount of free time older people spend in cultural centres. It is extremely important especially for older people whose ways of spending spare time may protect them from loneliness and alienation.

The “Art on Wheels” project was created in 2008 by Krakow – based art historians Barbara Łepkowska and Katarzyna Wydra. Institutional support for the project is provided by the Krakow branch of the Association of Art Historians (Stowarzyszenie Historyków Sztuki). The main purpose of the project is to create a specific museum and art-exploratory space within monuments and historic places well-known to local communities and, what follows, to make local residents fully aware of the importance and value of the cultural heritage of their village, town or municipality. “Art on Wheels” creators realize the above-mentioned aims through organizing and carrying out interactive educational workshops. The classes, that usually take place in historic churches, help to explain and bring local residents closer to the foundations of the history of the art, iconography, architecture, various artistic techniques and styles, as well as the perception of a work of art, its context, essence and role. Interactive workshops also promote tourism, conservation of cultural heritage and tradition of the regions. The beneficiaries of the project are mainly the inhabitants of rural areas of the country, where opportunities to participate in cultural events are in general difficult and limited. The “Art on Wheels” project contributes to the reduction of social differences and disparities in the access to culture and helps in the promotion of the region’s tourism value as well as the conversation of local cultural heritage.

From the very beginning, the Polish museological literature has drawn attention to the educational role of museums. Yet in practice, educators are not perceived as employees who deserve to be called “museologists”. The authoress postulates that educators should be treated as fully-fl edged museum employees, particularly that it is precisely them who museum visitors come into contact fi rst. That is why, it is important that they have an opportunity to be involved in all phases of the organization of the exhibition and enter into direct contact with the collection which constitutes the most important point of reference of all museum activity. – Yet one should naturally draw attention to the necessary competence: familiarity with the discipline of knowledge represented by the museum, good inter-personal skills, ability to be flexible and to adjust to the level represented by the visitors, as well as knowledge of culture codes and contexts. For an educator may act as a specific medium, who through creating a suitable atmosphere during a museum visit and through imparting information that is pervaded with the necessary value of authenticity, guides the visitor to new ways of thinking and helps him to get to know the truths and values which have so far remained unknown to him.

The article is a reflection on the publishing activities of the Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor Cricoteka in Krakow. Since 2000 there consistently appear extensive and very detailed chronicles describing the life and work of the artist. These chronicles, which include among others, fragments of old newspaper articles, notes, letters and memoirs, depict Kantor in a variety of situations and in a broad context of political events, cultural events, etc. These types of publications, which are rather rare among the publications of other cultural institutions, are the result of research carried out by Cricoteka (as a facility dedicated to a single artist, also created by himself). The author attempts to describe the work of Cricoteka and show the specificity of its publications. She also draws attention to the potential and opportunities that lie in this kind of research and publications, especially in the context of the new program for the Museum of Tadeusz Kantor.

The first museum similar to those we know today, was founded in the late seventeenth century. Half a century later archeologists discovered collections of erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum, lying for centuries under the ashes of Vesuvius, which surprised the scientific Enlightenment enthusiasts with its sensuality. There was a problem, what to do in a museum with exhibits, of undoubted historical value, or artistic, but obscene?
The first response was to create secret museums in which objects with erotic connotations would be stored, or even concealed. The need to separate objects that could not be shown to the public from the rest of the collection, led to the modern understanding of the word pornography, which was adopted for the determination of uncomfortable harvest of Vesuvian cities.
For the second response we had to wait for over 200 years – sex themed museums. Over the past 25 years, 16 institutions of this kind were created in Europe, out of which 11 continue to operate until today. One of them is located in Warsaw. Another may soon arise in Krakow. All of these are private initiatives, most of them with non-profit intentions, and the primary motivation for their creation was the passion of the founders and their possession of a collection of sexually marked objects, often collected by them over a few decades.
The elaboration of this article constitutes the subject-matter of the author’s thesis which he defended in 2010 in the department of culture management at the Jagiellonian University; the thesis was titled Museum of eroticism, eroticism of museum. Historical context, review and analysis of European sex themed museums, which was created under the supervision of Professor Emil Orzechowski Ph.D.

In this paper the author presents human creativity as the main source of culture. Logically, it comes even from the definition of culture, understood as everything created by men (everything, which does not belong to nature). Creation by man includes the material, symbolic and societal types of culture. In the field of symbolic culture, like art, science or media, the process of creativity includes activities which result in new and valuable products. Creativity develops in the private, social and cultural domains. In the private domain an individual creates something, which is new and valuable for himself (or herself). In the social domain an individual creates something, which is new and valuable to a group, where he or she belongs. Finally, creativity in the cultural domain means creating something, which is new and valuable for all human culture. Normally it is possible through the publication or public presentation of a product, after a process of selection. Thus, normally there exists a barrier of entering this main. Creativity in the domain of culture requires not only being a creative person in the psychological sense, but also a huge amount of knowledge and practice in the specific field of activity. But by enhancing the private and social creativity, it is possible to enlarge the number of persons, which could inspire to enter the domain of cultural activity. Moreover, the true creative activity always contains the individual, private, authentic internal perspective, and is always directed to some social environment.
Also, the new ways of distributing the creative products, like the Internet, makes the barrier to cultural creativity less tight, than they used to be in the past.