Page 11 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

SERIES EDITOR’S FORE WORD

The first public museum in Britain was the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,
which opened its doors in 1683. Almost two hundred years would pass, how-
ever, before the museum began to consolidate its modern form – an uneven
process of development which owed much to the emergence of other kinds of
institutions, not least the ‘Great Exhibition’ of 1851, but also the department
store. In the United States, various world’s fairs played a similar role as they
sought to ‘record the world’s advancement’ in terms of technological progress
and public enlightenment. Ever so gradually, from one national context to the
next, the features of the museum familiar to us today took root, yet not without
sparking controversy at times. Then, as now, the challenges associated with
putting certain aspects of social life ‘on display’ have posed acutely difficult –
and fiercely contested – questions about the mediation of power. After all, no
museum can escape entirely the accusation that its presentation of objects,
regardless of how scrupulous its efforts, is political; nor that its carefully
crafted decisions about inclusion are necessarily defined, in turn, by that which
is excluded.
Michelle Henning’s Museums, Media and Cultural Theory embarks on a
fascinating investigation of the cultural significance of museums and exhib-
itions. Its purview spans from seventeenth-century innovations, the product of
the first cabinets of ‘natural curiosities’ and ‘rarities’ gathered by merchants
and explorers in the course of their great voyages of discovery, to the inflections
of the ‘virtual museums’ engendered by the new media of today. Maintained
throughout Henning’s discussion is a desire to discern the basis for a materialist
study of the museum as media-form. In the course of elaborating this fresh
approach, she devotes particular attention to the communicative capacity of