Page 20 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

4 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

I would have liked, despite there being numerous writings on Australian
museums and a growing body of writing on museums in the Americas, the
Middle East, Africa, and the Far East. I have also had to leave out exhibitionary
practices I would have liked to include, notably world’s fairs, which are only
mentioned in passing. Another reason for some of the notable absences in this
book is my desire not to overlap too heavily with another book in this series,
Bella Dicks’ Culture on Display. Museums and exhibitions play an important
role in Dicks’ argument. Her interest is in the conditions which make places into
attractions, making them ‘visitable’ and in the role of museums and other sites
of display in the production of cultural identity and the representation of
culture (Dicks 2003: 144–68)
This book is concerned with thinking about museums as a means of thinking
about our experiential world. The topics, themes and historical moments
discussed here are chosen because they seem to make vivid particular problems
or contradictions which unsettle some of the certainties of text- and discourse-
based cultural and media studies. I pay particular attention to recent develop-
ments in museums and new media and the relationship between these and two
significant historical moments: the interwar period (1920s and 30s) and the
sixteenth to eighteenth-century culture of curiosity. I do not want to suggest
that these are stepping stones in a developmental history of museums, but
rather that they are moments which can be set in productive juxtaposition:
when new display practices are invented, invested with the task of producing
new forms of social identity; when experience, attention and knowledge seem
to be in crisis for one reason or another; and when the world of things makes
itself felt in particularly pressing ways.