Page 109 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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recognition of how diversity channelled through certain experience-led exhibi-
tionary strategies may end up producing homogeneity. Museums may subscribe
to the politics of multiculturalism, or emphasize pluralism and tolerance, yet at
the same time aim to control and produce much the same experience for all
visitors. The current strategies for manufacturing subjective experience that we
may find in museums in the United States, and increasingly worldwide, are
premised on an assumption of universal human sameness and monolithic truth.
Hein (2000: 80) says:

Underlying the promise of existential communion, and despite the appeal
to ‘diverse’ audiences, the epistemological conviction remains strong – in
museums as elsewhere – that ultimately there is one truth and that a single
(and well-controlled) stimulus will recall it . . . Even as we stand, side by
side, simultaneously undergoing our separate experiences, ‘shaped’ by a
museum environment, we are prompted to carry away the judgement of a
‘same’ and publicly acknowledged reality.
Earlier in this chapter I discussed Theodor Adorno’s writing on standardiza-
tion. The differences between products appeal to our sense of distinction, of
our difference from others, and give an appearance of choice and diversity.
However Adorno argued that in a capitalist society dominated by mass produc-
tion, these differences are actually superficial and conceal an underlying same-
ness. There is a parallel here: our own complex social attachments, the social
basis for our different knowledges and understandings, and the real diversity of
experience that we bring as visitors to the museum are subordinated to a con-
trolled museum experience designed to reveal a larger, shared, and preferably
unquestionable truth. This standardization of experience is also associated
with commodification. The public museum has always been an institution
devoted to the representation of universal truths, but it has not always dealt in
experience in this way. This new orientation towards the production of experi-
ence has developed since the 1980s, during a period when free-market or neo-
liberal policies have steadily privatized and increased market control over culture,
media and education. In this new social context, experience becomes a com-
modity, purchasable for the price of a ticket. Across a range of attractions,
visitors are treated as consumers of experience; their sense of themselves as
individuals is appealed to, while real and significant social differences are
repressed or disavowed. Though she doesn’t make much of it, Hein recognizes
that the new experience emphasis is linked to commodification and to the
emergence of a new experience economy (2000: note 12, 198).
We can distinguish between various kinds of exhibition strategies: between
object-led and experience–led exhibits, or, as I did in Chapter 2, between hands-
on exhibits and illusionistic and simulation-based approaches to display. But