Page 107 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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but also how museums have incorporated various modern media. In particular
the move toward computers as display devices, and the association of com-
puters with interactivity, has had an impact on long-established notions of
hands-on experience and education in museums (in Chapter 5, there is further
discussion of the role of new media and information technologies in the
museum). However, as I have suggested, the move away from artefacts is not a
rejection of a somatic and sensory address to the visitor; rather it involves a
greater emphasis on the visitor’s own perceptions and body.
The philosopher Hilde Hein has argued that museums in general have moved
from focusing on objects to an emphasis on the subject (2000: 66). Museums
have become increasingly ‘people-centred’, attentive to visitors’ own experi-
ences and values. Importantly, this does not mean that these are equally valued.
Indeed, one aspect of the change in museums which Hein describes is their
self-perception as institutions devoted to shaping the values and beliefs of the
public. For instance, the new National Museum of the American Indian in
Washington DC has issued brochures describing the museum’s aim ‘to change
forever the way people view Native peoples of this hemisphere. To correct
misconceptions. To end prejudice. To stop injustice. And to demonstrate how
Indian culture has enriched the world’ (NMAI brochure, 2004). The project
director at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, also in Washington DC, stated
that it ‘recast the story of the Holocaust to teach fundamental American values
. . . pluralism, democracy, restraint on government, the inalienable rights of
individuals, the inability of governments to enter into freedom of religion’
(cited in Gourevitch 1993: 55). Dawn Casey, the director of the National
Museum of Australia, faced with criticism regarding the museum’s representa-
tion of the early conflict between the first Australians and the European colon-
ists, argued: ‘We see our role as changing people’s attitudes’ (Griffin 2002).
Hein argues that this emphasis on values and attitudes entails an increased
appeal to people’s emotional and sensory responses. She diagnoses a tendency
toward the use of objects in simulations and reconstructions to elicit subjective
sensations, emotions and feelings, rather than as objects of knowledge that
might ‘speak for themselves’ (Hein 2000: 79). Museums are increasingly
involved in the manufacture of experience (Hein 2000: 67). Hein uses the word
‘experience’ to refer to a concept of subjective aesthetic experience, which
emerges in part in the art theory of John Dewey. Dewey shifted the emphasis
from the art object (prioritized in traditional aesthetics) to the viewer’s experi-
ence in its presence. Experience-oriented exhibits are story-centred, like media
texts. They rely less on the authenticity and specific provenance of objects than
on their ‘corroborative power’ (Hein 2000: 61). Like a television programme in
which pieces of footage can be edited together to produce a sense of a place or
time without deriving from that actual place and time, such story-centred