Page 37 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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curiosity were signifiers of intellect, power, privilege and property (Daston
1995: 402). This is not all that they were, however. Housed in specially designed
cabinets or rooms, curiosity cabinets were understood to reflect a scholarly
interest on the part of their owners in the potential of the anomalous and the
marvellous to unlock ‘nature’s secrets’. Since knowledge was associated with
power, curiosity cabinets became a necessary accompaniment to great wealth.
Many were arranged on the basis of highly complex philosophical, religious
and occult theories (Hooper–Greenhill 1992: 105–26; Benedict 2001: 53–4).
Objects were chosen according to these ideas and to their rarity and curiosity
value. These were not distinct: the very aspects of an object which designated it
worthy of scientific or philosophical study also marked it out as a luxury
(Daston 1995: 396).
In the age of curiosity, knowledge and ostentation are bound together.
The eighteenth-century society which viewed the ostentation of the aristocracy
with such suspicion had little sense of this connection. Burke could only defend
such collections by listing them in categories already belonging to the museum
age. He pointed the reader to the eighteenth-century private collections more in
tune with new scientific and historical ways of ordering and classifying objects,
and drew attention away from the status of these objects as curiosities, except in
relation to science and scientific curiosity. By the time he was writing, curiosity
had an ambivalent status, with associations both of scientific enquiry and
of fickle consumption. In 1757, Burke himself had established the place of
curiosity at the heart of the developing consumer society when he wrote
critically of it as the desire for or pleasure in novelty:

But as those things which engage us merely by their novelty, cannot attach
us for any length of time, curiosity is the most superficial of all the
affections; it changes its object perpetually; it has an appetite which is
very sharp, but very easily satisfied; and it has always an appearance of
giddiness, restlessness and anxiety.
(Burke 1958: 31)
The appetite of curiosity was said to drive overconsumption because, by
the mid-eighteenth century, it has come to represent a fickle attachment to
novelties, although the early curiosity collectors had understood their collections
in complex and erudite ways. Even in the late seventeenth century, the social
uselessness of the propertied classes was associated with the low use-value
of curiosities. Then, the attack on the virtuosos and curiosity collectors was
also an attack on the legitimacy of science as embodied by the Royal Society
(Benedict 2001: 46–52). Scientists and ‘curious men’ were suspicious on
religious grounds, not only because of their interest in the ‘unnatural’ and
strange, but also due to their indiscreet tendencies to probe and question what