Page 34 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

18 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

In the nineteenth century, aesthetic experience was understood in terms of
absorbing the aura of the object, immersing oneself in it, becoming transported
by it. Aesthetic contemplation was encouraged by picturesque arrangements of
collections or specially designed spaces, such as the chapel-like gallery of the
Sistine Madonna. A more recent example is the Rothko room at the Tate
Gallery (now Tate Britain) in London. But even chronologically arranged
collections could not prevent the singularity of the object from piercing the
narrative flow for a viewer open to the experience of aura. While chronological
arrangement subordinates the individual object or artwork to the larger narra-
tive of art historical progress, the newly auratic object resists this contextualiza-
tion. From the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, all sorts of objects
(not just art) could become the focus of aesthetic attention. The fact that this
kind of experience was to be had in even the most systematic and pedagogic
arrangements is not in spite of the museum but because of it. That is, the very
act of turning something into a museum object makes it available for aesthetic
contemplation. The museum animates objects as the sources of knowledge, and
simultaneously as aesthetic, auratic things.

Curious things

This new way of apprehending things is produced in and by the public museum.
At the same time, these museums were based on the denigration (and in some
cases forcible destruction) of older relationships to – and between – things. The
private collections seized in post-Revolutionary France were used to construct a
new fidelity to the Republic. This was only possible through the severing of the
collections from their collectors and from those people’s habits of consumption
and material attachments. This happened both materially and discursively, that
is, it involved actual material and economic changes and also changed ways of
understanding consumption practices.
By the time of the French Revolution, the landed aristocracy were condemned
for their idleness, for their extravagance, and for living off the labour of others.
Their collecting practice was understood as part of this. In 1790 the English
philosopher Edmund Burke attacked the Revolutionary policy of confiscating
aristocratic property. He asked why the collecting practices of the French gentry,
this ‘laudable use of estates’, should be viewed as less valid than the same
collections placed in a museum. Burke recognized, in keeping with the general
view of the day, that the collections of the aristocracy were the expenditures of
the idle rich, but to justify that excessive expenditure he associated it with
museums (‘great permanent establishments’) and contrasted them with other
‘innumerable fopperies and follies’ in which the opulent rich indulged. He