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Rather we can see both as tendencies at work, pulling museums in different
directions, though the use of closely related display techniques and exhibition
strategies.
The new display aesthetic has been shaped by a revived interest in curiosity
cabinets (especially in natural history museums) and this aesthetic is associated
with an epistemological structure that privileges allegorical and arbitrary
associations, correspondences and resonances. Though some of the museums I
have discussed in this section are large and spectacular, curiosity is associated
with miniaturization, with a wonder that can be inspired by ‘small and shabby
objects’, more so than with technical or architectural spectacle (Adorno cited in
Bann 2003: 125–6). It is associated with the pleasure in things and in their
accumulation, with amassed small objects rather than isolated and monu-
mental ones. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles exhibits
miniature collages made from the scales of butterfly wings, and sculptures on
pinheads, amongst many other curious and marvellous things. The collection
of curiosities and marvels at the Chateau d’Oiron in Poitou, France, is work
bought or commissioned from contemporary artists and in these the once dis-
crete categories of artefact and natural object can be seen to merge. Stephen
Bann gives the example of the French artist Hubert Duprat who works with
jewels and precious metals, even providing them as material for caddis flies.
These insects take the minerals and construct their chrysalises from them,
which appear as tiny jewelled cases. Duprat’s art recalls early modern curi-
osities that combined nature and human artifice (such as drinking vessels made
from nautilus shells and coral) and as Bann argues, ‘the “wonder” arises pre-
cisely from the difficulty of separating out the agency of the artist from the pure
spectacular potentiality of the natural world’ (2003: 127–8). In the most thor-
oughgoing curiosity museums, the fake is indistinguishable from the real, the
artwork indistinguishable from the museum, and nature and human artifice
mimic one another.
Wider evidence of a revival of the culture of curiosities might include the
artist-taxidermist Tia Resleure’s non-realist taxidermy (anthropomorphic
‘grotesques’ in the Victorian and Edwardian tradition – see www.
acaseofcuriosities.com) and the photographer Rosamond Wolff Purcell’s
documenting of curiosity collections and museums, as well as a number of
recent illustrated books on curiosity cabinets (see for instance Mauries 2002).
One possibility is that this revival of interest in curiosities is a kind of return to
thingliness in the face of expanding ‘virtual worlds’. However in my view this is
not the case, since a proliferation of curiosity museums can be found on the
World Wide Web. The term ‘virtual museum’ is very much overused, and I
purposely exclude from this category all those websites that work primarily as
promotional and outreach sites for large museums (see Huhtamo 2002: 1–3). By