Page 31 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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relationships within a community of objects. We can think of these relationships
of equivalence as similar to those which make objects exchangeable as com-
modities in a market, insofar as they are based on socially established criteria or
rules (Appadurai 1986: 14–5). The museum object is removed from commodity
circulation, but by the late nineteenth century a museum artefact’s value is
partly determined by exchangeability – by its ability to be circulated between
museum collections and substituted for other objects that belong to the same
type. Tony Bennett says that at the end of the century, in most kinds of
museum, relations of equivalence between objects were crucial for the construc-
tion of historical sequences (2002: 37). In this respect, an object’s ability to
stand in for other objects was often more important than its singularity. This is
one of the things which distinguishes the Victorian museum from the private
collections out of which it had been constructed. In the cabinets of curiosity of
the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, which we will look at more closely later,
objects had been collected and displayed on the basis of their uniqueness, or
their status as anomalies – even if in practice, these collections had certain
staples, such as the obligatory crocodile hanging from the ceiling. In the last
decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the
museum replaced this with an emphasis on the typical and with historicism (for
more on Victorian historicism see Chapter 2, section 1).
We could say that the core difference between the late nineteenth-century
museum and its predecessors was its privileging of the typical over the singular.
Yet museums of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, saw not just
the gradual replacement of the singular curiosity with the typical specimen, but
the emergence of a new kind of singularity based in aesthetics. Not surpris-
ingly, this is most explicit in the case of the art museum. Writing in the late
1940s, André Malraux credited the art museum with the development and
popularisation of a new way of looking at art (1967: 9). It was new in two
respects: first because it was determined by the art historical arrangement of the
museum, and second because it was newly aestheticized. We have become used
to the idea of the art museum as schooling us in art history. Thus, as Fisher
argues, when we stroll rapidly through the museum we are not misusing it: our
walk ‘recapitulates . . . the motion of art history itself, its restlessness, its for-
ward motion, its power to link’ (1991: 9). However, if encyclopaedism and
historicism dominated museum displays by the end of the nineteenth century,
many of the objects that they marshalled into order were already enchanted
objects: not dry material evidence or examples of a type, but objects deemed to
be possessed of aesthetic qualities.
As the art and media historian Hans Belting (2001) narrates, during the early
years of the Louvre there was a dispute about whether the museum should show
only singular paintings – the ‘masterpieces’ – or other paintings considered