Page 36 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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excesses of the aristocracy. George Marie Butel-Dumont’s 1771 Théorie de
Luxe drew consumer goods such as white bread into the category of luxury. By
linking luxury with utility, he separated it from ostentatious display and excess.
He advocated that material objects should be used as a sensual source of human
happiness, but not for status purposes (Kwass 2003: 95). Dumont found a way
to please the advocates of modesty and the interests of the luxury market,
namely by making a sharp separation between individual pleasure and social
appearances – between the public and the private. This was the justification
needed by the bourgeoisie, who could live luxuriously and still condemn the
ostentation of the aristocracy. While the aristocracy had first produced the
critique of luxury, the bourgeoisie now adopted it. The association of ostenta-
tious luxury with femininity became a means to question both the moral
standing and the right to rule of aristocratic men. The conspicuous consumption
of the aristocracy had become a liability.
Although Burke was keen to separate serious collecting practices from the
accumulation of fripperies and trivia, in practice the separation was not so
clear, nor had it been a recognized distinction until then. For one thing, the
‘curiosities’ amassed in private collections from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries were part of the luxury trade. In the seventeenth century, the
word ‘curiosity’ began to be used to describe things admired for their beauty,
their intricacy, their rarity or their marvellous and even mythical properties.
Curiosities were therefore also luxury items – unusual, rare and ‘extravagant’.
Trade between Europeans and the inhabitants of places like the Indies and the
Pacific brought valuable spices, exotic foodstuffs and other luxury goods that
were eventually to transform the everyday lives of Europeans. But alongside this
was another trade – in the carapaces of pangolins and alligators; in bird-skins
stuffed with straw; in rare plants and seeds; in everyday and ritual artefacts,
fetishes and magical objects; in living animals, monsters and ‘freaks of nature’;
in artefacts associated with folktales and with mythological and historical
events. These were the curiosities destined for the collections of wealthy noble-
men in Europe, to be housed in their curiosity cabinets (or Wunderkammern),
their botanical gardens and their menageries.
These things were intended for conspicuous consumption. It is often said that
the curiosity cabinets were highly private, yet it seems that the collecting of
curiosities was an important part of the self-presentation of the aristocracy,
along with flamboyant dress and graceful posture. By the beginning of the
seventeenth century, connoisseurs and learned men travelled to see one another’s
collections. Illustrated catalogues and visitor guides were also circulated,
cementing the reputation of princes and collectors in the minds of those who
had never visited their collection (Daston and Park 1998: 265–7). At their peak
in the mid-seventeenth century, both curiosity cabinets and the emotion of