Page 21 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Let me reward your patience by unlocking some of the cases and putting
their contents into your hands. At once you realize that these treasures,
recently so remote, so dead it seemed, come again to life.
(Stewart Culin, cited in Bronner 1989: 232)
If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest
existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of
souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and
house it wants to nestle.
(Walter Benjamin 1983: 55)

The life of things in the museum age

In the Grimm brothers’ version of the Snow White story, after Snow White dies,
poisoned by an apple, she is placed in a glass coffin by the seven dwarves. Inside
the coffin her appearance does not change: she still looks as she did alive. A
passing prince tries to buy her from the dwarves, who refuse to sell her but
eventually give her to him. As the coffin is carried away, it is jolted, the poisoned
apple becomes dislodged from her throat, and Snow White awakes.
The glass cases used in museums, called vitrines, have often been referred to
as glass coffins. As the Snow White story suggests, this links the museum with
death, and simultaneously with the possibility of awakening the dead. In the
glass coffin fantasy, the body encased in the glass is not dead for eternity, but in
suspended animation. The implication that museum objects are somehow alive
is a peculiar one since the majority of museum objects have either never been
alive or are things which were once alive and are now, very definitely, dead. The
fantasy of awakening them from their enchanted sleep is at one level meta-
phoric: it means to make them more vivid and communicative for the audience,
by removing the constraints placed on them by the museum. But there is a little
more to it than this. It is also a fantasy of possession. The expectation is that