Page 115 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Clare patted Prince Albert’s foot and thought: when I’m seventeen, in
about a hundred years’ time, and I fall in love, I’ll have assignations here.
‘Meet you under the blue whale’ I’ll say, ‘or by the iguanodon’, and we’ll
melt at each other, like in old films, all among the invertebrates.
(Penelope Lively, The House in Norham Gardens, 1974)

Itineraries

Museums and museum exhibitions make objects out of things and stage them for
an audience. Yet the museum is also a space for romantic encounters, for day-
dreams, for losing one’s self or imagining one’s self differently. These possi-
bilities are seldom articulated in museum discourse – in the stated intentions of
designers, curators, educators or directors – nor do they play a large part in the
critical discourse on museums (an exception is Kavanagh 2000). Nevertheless
museums have always had a dream-like or magical aspect: ‘they come into con-
tact, on the one hand, with scientific research and, on the other hand, with “the
dreamy tide of bad taste” ’ (Benjamin 1999a: 406). In this, they reveal their
connection with the great industrial exhibitions and world’s fairs, which began
with the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition, and which, much more explicitly,
seemed to embody a world of fantasy and magic, even for those who did not visit:
I myself recall, from my childhood, how the news of the Crystal Palace
reached us in Germany, and how pictures of it were hung in the middle-
class parlours of distant provincial towns. It seemed then that the world we
knew from old fairy tales – of the princess in the glass coffin, of queens
and elves dwelling in crystal houses – had come to life.
(Julius Lessing cited in Benjamin 1999a: 184)
This reminiscence suggests the degree to which the Crystal Palace was the
perfect casing for fetishized commodities, and how it harnessed a deeply rooted
European cultural imaginary to the world of industrial production.