Page 41 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

OBJECT || 25

however, ‘nondescripts were apt rather to appeal to casual curiosity-seekers . . .
They were increasingly likely to figure, not in learned zoological discussions . . .
but in the posters and handbills advertising sideshows and menageries’ (Ritvo
1997: 55). Like ‘curiosity’, ‘nondescript’ becomes a negatively valued term
associated with a certain kind of trivial thrill-seeking. The prurient looker (who
‘gawps’ and ‘gapes’ instead of gazing) is viewed from a high culture perspective
as easily duped or taken in.
The trustees, directors, and curators of the great museums of Europe,
Australia and North America tended to see popular entertainments as
encouraging improper attention, and appealing to a crude lust for entertainment
that they associated with the working class. David Goodman (1990) refers to
the anxiety they expressed regarding such forms of attention as ‘fear of circuses’.
Museum authorities also began to vocally distance the museum from the curios-
ity cabinets, which they castigated as chaotic, poorly preserved and unscientific.
By the 1860s, the story of the museum was already being told as a story of the
progress away from ‘mere curiosity’, chaotic display and poor preservation,
toward science, ordered typology and new techniques in preservation. This
teleological account, which is still rehearsed today, relies on reading certain
cabinets (such as Olaus Worm’s cabinet in Copenhagen) as intermediate stages,
in that they begin to use a recognizable classification system (Goodman 1990).
In this way, the curiosity cabinet was presented as the primitive ancestor of the
modern museum. Its marvellous and anomalous objects could only find a place
in the public museum if they could be transformed into typical or representative
specimens. The display of anomalies, oddities and the atypical became the
specialism of fairgrounds and circuses, freak shows and curio (or dime)
museums. The nineteenth century natural history museums, for instance, had
inherited vast numbers of preserved animals from the curiosity cabinets. Yet the
stuffed ‘freaks of nature’ (two-headed lambs, Siamese-twin pigs and so on)
which had been commonplace in the early collections, were now only to be
found in popular curio museums. The public’s interest in these things was seen
as improper, prurient or salacious.
One of the important insights of Tony Bennett’s (1995) work is that the
museum should not be treated on its own, but rather as part of an ‘exhibitionary
complex’ which took shape in the nineteenth century. This complex included
the spectacular displays of popular curio museums, world’s fairs and trade
exhibitions, amusement parks, shopping arcades and department stores. While
the old curiosity collections passed on their objects, voluntarily or reluctantly,
to the public museums, they left a legacy of a different kind to the other sites of
the exhibitionary complex. I believe what they bequeathed was curiosity itself.
The public museum distanced itself from these other sites of exhibition and
display partly because curiosity and curious things did not sit well with the