Page 17 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

INTRODUC TION

Museums and exhibitions have not been, until recently, amongst the usual
objects of cultural studies. Nor are they commonly considered as media and
studied as such. However, museums and exhibitions have been studied by
people working in all sorts of disciplines, and neither the old discipline of
museology, nor the younger one of museum studies, can claim a monopoly on
them. I work within cultural studies, a very undisciplined discipline. In my view,
cultural studies is best understood not in terms of its objects, but in terms of a
certain critical and methodological disposition. This makes it possible for
almost anything to become an object for cultural studies, but a related (and
possibly worrying) phenomenon is that many other disciplines have started to
look an awful lot like cultural studies. My interest is not so much in applying
cultural studies approaches or theories to new objects, as in enabling those
objects – in this case, museums – to rewrite cultural and media studies.
To approach museums from cultural and media studies is to approach them,
not with an armoury of theoretical ‘tools’ but with a set of interests. Cultural
studies is associated with those approaches that emphasize the museum’s role in
governance and its ideological character. In the 1990s, writers including Tony
Bennett, Carol Duncan, Douglas Crimp and Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, amongst
others, introduced European critical theory to Anglophone museum studies.
They responded to the work of Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and Pierre
Bourdieu amongst others. Through these critical perspectives, museums were
identified as sites for the classification and ordering of knowledge, the produc-
tion of ideology and the disciplining of a public. These new approaches
challenged the liberal perception of museums as predominantly benevolent
institutions and the complacency of an art history rooted in connoisseurship,