Page 126 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

110 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

the current director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, in his previous
role as the director of the National Gallery in London:
I think that the point for the public of museums is not that the public
should learn something but that they should become something . . . I think
that the role . . . of scholars and curators is not to put themselves between
the public and the objects, not in any very elaborate sense to explain the
objects, but to exhort the visitor to a direct experience, to an unmediated
vision.
(MacGregor 1994 cited in Trodd 2003: 17–18)
MacGregor claims that art museums, and the practice of aesthetic contem-
plation, are transformative, as religious ritual is intended to be transformative
(Duncan 1995: 13). He is opposed to explanation as mediating and interfering
with the visitors’ communion with the objects. Yet, as I have suggested in previ-
ous chapters, no experience in the museum is unmediated. Nineteenth-century
aesthetes were able to experience paintings as directly addressing their souls
because of the trajectory by which these paintings had entered the museum and
because of their own (formal and informal) training in new modes of percep-
tion and appreciation. The directness of the experience seems to legitimate the
view that aesthetic experience transcends the ways of seeing belonging to a
specific culture and class, and that aesthetic qualities are innate in those art
objects designated as canonical. Thus MacGregor expects this passionate and
transformative experience of the art object to be available to ‘the public’ in
general, with some prodding and directing.
On the one hand, museum visitors are expected to experience the art object
in a ‘direct’ and ‘unmediated’ way, but on the other hand they are supposed to
be discerning, able to make aesthetic judgements, and to find aesthetic value in
those objects admitted into the canon. This attitude ignores the fact that the
mode of attention and value system required for aesthetic experience are tacitly
learnt through immersion in a specific culture. Through appropriate acts of
attention, the quality of an artwork supposedly reveals itself. In practice this
means that far from being universal, aesthetic experience is one way in which
museums function to differentiate populations. This argument was put by the
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1997, 2003). He conducted visitor studies in art
museums in the 1960s and found that the ability to make such judgements was
measurably linked to social class. A taste for art and the ability to discern
between different kinds of art is one way that people establish their position.
Art becomes capital, not just because it can be owned, accumulated and directly
exchanged for cash, but also because a disposition toward art can be cultivated
and used as a social and cultural asset (Bourdieu 1997, 2003). Taste and
connoisseurship are embodied forms of cultural capital, not simply reflecting