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virtuoso to castration via the term ‘knackered’ (King 1994: 38–9). In short, the
‘knack’ encompassed the performance and mannerisms associated with homo-
sexuality as well as the objects that virtuosos collected.
The association of aristocratic flamboyance with male homosexuality con-
tinues in nineteenth-century dandies and in the aesthetic of decadence. Accord-
ing to the literary historian Janell Watson, aesthetes in the late nineteenth
century collected decorative art objects in rejection of ‘rationalism, utilitarian-
ism, scientific positivism, and progressivism’ (1999: 13). In France, such objects
were usually described as ‘bibelots’, like the ‘knick-knack’ a term which could
cover antiques associated with the pre-Revolutionary regime, or new mass-
produced goods sold in the magasins des nouveautés. The bibelot’s association
with the feminine, the ornamental, and the decorative arts made it subordinate
in the hierarchies of the Academie des Beaux-Arts and of classicism, thus ‘it
becomes a vehicle for anti-classical and anti-Academy sentiments (Watson
1999: 17). However, as the bibelot became mass-consumed, and found in every
bourgeois and petty-bourgeois interior, the dandy set himself apart from other
collectors of bibelots by his ability to spot the rare collectible. In this way
dandies and aesthetes engaged in games of social distinction (Watson 1999: 20).
Dandies and aesthetes, though not always homosexual, refused the standard
male roles of economic productivity and familial reproduction. Their collecting
practices formed part of this refusal. Literary theorist Leora Auslander (1996)
draws a distinction between the dandies’ collecting and other kinds of collect-
ing. She argues that collecting through auction houses and antique markets was
a form of masculine consumption at a time when consumption was heavily
coded as feminine. Practiced in moderation, such collecting mirrored museum
practices, and gained respectability through association with knowledge-
production and patrimony (Auslander 1996: 88–9). But excessive collecting did
not fit this model of masculinity, especially where it was unrelated to financial
investment, or knowledge production, and the basis for opulent public displays
(Auslander 1996: 85).
However we cannot disregard the museum’s own associations with over-
accumulation and with a kind of superficiality of character (see Nietzsche,
Chapter 2). Watson points out that the bibelot was seen as bringing the
museum into the bourgeois household, and so precipitating cultural decline. If
the museum displaces art by removing it from its original site, turning it into
merely a fragment, the bibelot displaces it again and fragments it again by
miniaturizing it to fit in the bourgeois salon (Watson 1999: 24). The French
critic Paul Bourget, writing in 1885, saw museums as encouraging ‘dilettantism
and criticism’ as opposed to ‘genius and creation’ (Bourget cited in Watson
1999: 22–3). For Bourget, bibelot collectors such as the Goncourt brothers were
‘des hommes de musée’, men of the museum, ‘subjects constructed in and by a