Page 170 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

154 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

‘virtual museums’ I mean those hundreds of peculiar collections that exist on
the Web (and often only there) such as the Kooks Museum, the World Famous
Asphalt Museum, and the Russian Communal Flat Virtual Museum. These
websites – sometimes art projects, the websites of collectors, personal research
projects, or student sites – grow out of the tradition of the dime museums,
curiosity museums and odd idiosyncratic museums, as well as out of the avail-
ability of websites as places to display personal obsessions. The virtual museum
makes explicit the link between a return to curiosity and the development of
new media. In both there is a turn toward networked and decentered knowl-
edge, and a privileging of arbitrary associations and resonances. A number of
writers have commented on the way in which the internet rewrites the structures
of memory and knowledge, challenging the hierarchical ordering of the archive
and appearing much more like a cabinet of curiosities (Ernst 2000b; Gere 1997,
1999).
The return to curiosity is not a return to the hierarchical universe of the
original age of curiosity, but a turn to a plurality of perspectives, of ways of
attending to objects, and of narratives. The curiosity cabinet and curiosity
museum are now associated with challenges to traditional hierarchies of
objects and information, of what counts as worth preserving or archiving, and
an embracing of the anomalous, the odd and the monstrous. Most of all, I
think, curiosity is about contact – about bringing things closer, and prying
them open, the pleasures Benjamin saw in the mass audience’s response to film.
Contact and closeness do not necessarily require the actual presence of the
thing – indeed as Benjamin observed, reproductions, copies and likenesses are
often the means by which the world offers itself for close inspection (2002:
105). But they are about overcoming a distance between self and thing, subject
and object. It has become a basic premise of cultural and media studies to set
out to demonstrate how the world we experience is socially constructed, pro-
duced through texts, discourse and ideology. Yet media and culture are also
sensuous, and the world of things is not passive but acts upon us. The pleasure
of curiosity, as I suggested at the beginning of this book, is connected with its
ability to unseat a secure sense of self, and with close contact with that which is
strange and other. If museums are to work as contact zones and facilitate these
encounters, they might also appeal, as the curiosity cabinet did, to the cor-
respondences, sympathies and resemblances that appear between outwardly
disconnected things.