Page 29 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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(Barber 1980: 27–40; see also Chapter 2, section 2). The democratization of
treasure also meant the democratization of the aristocracy’s social pastimes.
Activities such as looking at art or curious objects from around the world,
strolling in beautiful gardens, or looking at live animals in the menagerie, were
transferred to new public institutions such as the museum, the public park, and
the zoo (Fisher 1991: 7). In the museum, the public now gained access to once
privately owned artefacts and to sights previously only available to those who
had the means to travel abroad (Griffiths 1996). This change marks the beginning
of what Germain Bazin named ‘the museum age’ (1967).
This process of democratization involved a redistribution of wealth and,
importantly, of access to knowledge. It also involved the dissemination of the
ideals of democracy. The ‘treasure’ which found its way into the public
museums of Europe and the New World became a means of communicating
democratic ideals. In France, the Louvre, which opened in 1793, was one of the
means by which the ideals of post-Revolutionary democracy were constructed
and disseminated (Hooper-Greenhill 1992: 171–3). The Louvre represented
not only the new post-Revolutionary values of liberty, fraternity and equality,
but also the French nation to itself. It contained French private, court and
church art collections seized during the 1789 revolution, and art from other
parts of Europe, including famous antiquities from Rome, ransacked by the
Revolutionary armies. The Louvre came to aggrandize Napoleon himself, as the
Revolutionary state became the Napoleonic Empire (Belting 2001: 29).
Many studies have analysed the role of museums in nation-building and in
the construction of national identity (see for instance Kaplan 1994). This role
was carried out not just through the ideological content of exhibits but also
through the use of objects and displays to produce new habits and new patterns
of behaviour. In his book The Birth of the Museum, Tony Bennett has written
about how museums participate in governing people through the attempt to
manage the conduct of visitors and through the social routines and perform-
ances they elicit (1995: 46). He argues that in the nineteenth century the
museum became a ‘reformatory of manners,’ that is, a means to ‘civilize’ the
working classes. Thus the democratization of treasure was also about the trans-
formation of a people into a democratic citizenry. This was both a response to
the perceived threat of the working class as a dangerous, revolutionary force
(1848 saw uprisings in Berlin, Vienna, Paris and London), and an attempt to
reform drunken and dissolute behaviour amongst that class. Bennett shows how
museums attempted to turn the working class into a manageable and civilized
‘public’ by encouraging self-regulation and self-monitoring (1995: 28). In later
chapters we will look in more detail at questions of social class, and at the
museum’s educational role. Here, let us simply note that the democratization of
treasure produced a demand for new habits and new kinds of attentiveness