Page 28 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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museum procedures and practices were introduced and in which they became
sedimented. In the second section I provide a chronological account of the
emergence of the modern public museum, told in terms of how it transforms
things and the way we attend to them. The third section describes the rela-
tionship to things thus displaced, via the social history of the luxury trade and
the curiosity cabinet. The final section looks at the relationships between
museum objects and commodities, between the museum and the department
store, and at aesthetic appreciation in the art museum in relation to commod-
ity aesthetics. But at the basis of all of this is a concern with the role the
museum plays in the historic transformation of the relationships between
people and things.

The democratization of treasure

Museums as we now know them belong to a very particular historical era,
appearing first in eighteenth-century Europe. Public museums participated in
what Fisher refers to as the ‘democratization of treasure’ (1991: 7). Through
different routes, the first public museums made private treasure and colonial
loot available to a mass audience. For instance, two of the early public
museums, the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, made the
possessions of the wealthy into the possessions of the nation, the first via the
donation of a wealthy benefactor, the second through the dispossession of
the aristocracy during and after the French Revolution. Before the eighteenth
century, some royal and private collections were accessible to a public, usually
for an entrance fee, but in them the objects remained firmly as treasure to be
displayed to a restricted and privileged audience as an expression of power. It is
only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that museums presented
their objects as the wealth of peoples and nations rather than of individuals.
The democratization of treasure transferred not only the possessions but also
the leisure practices of the wealthy to the middle classes, and eventually the
working classes too. When Sir Hans Sloane bequeathed his entire and rather
idiosyncratic collection to the British nation in 1753, he participated in the
democratization of not only the objects in his collection but also practices of
collecting and forms of knowledge (Benedict 2001: 180–3). Virtuoso collectors,
including Sloane, were usually the subjects of ridicule for their obsessive collect-
ing, but the founding of the British Museum enabled collecting and viewing
collections to be widely understood as purposeful and knowledge producing.
The public museum made scientific knowledge accessible to people who did not
have access to the universities. Collecting, especially natural history collecting,
became a popular practice in Britain, participated in across the social classes