Page 42 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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emphasis on systematic knowledge of the typical, or with aesthetic experience.
Yet, the museum isolated itself only by careful management of both the visitors
and the collections. It had to work hard to transform its inherited collections
into museum objects. This process was necessitated by the unstable and unset-
tling potential of both the appetite of curiosity, and the material things
designated as curiosities.
In the museum age, objects must be made sense of, classified and given their
place in the hierarchy of things and cultures. When Captain Cook set out on his
first journeys, Nicholas Thomas argues, the aesthetic qualities of a culture’s
artefacts were not necessarily linked to judgements about the culture as a whole
(1991: 131–2). In later journeys, however, artefacts were used in the attempts to
produce an evolutionary hierarchy of Pacific peoples, and even the most ‘curious’
object became the subject of anthropological classification. The objects from
the curiosity cabinets, marshalled into the new public museums were produced
as intelligible material culture. To make the artefacts of the old curiosity
collections work as museum objects, the museum had to stabilize them, reduce
their potential to unsettle and make them the legitimate objects of scientific,
historical or aesthetic interest. In the first decades of the twentieth century,
museum authorities regularly complained that visitors continued to treat
museums as ‘storehouses’ of curiosities. In 1904 the influential League of
Empire advised the ‘orderly arrangement and transformation of mere curios
into objects of scientific interest by appropriate classification’ (cited in
Coombes 1991: 194).
Meanwhile, curiosity became the province of the popular amusements already
mentioned as well as of the cinema and the new emporiums of consumption,
the department stores and shopping arcades. Here were offered the sensations
of the unfamiliar and faraway within everyday cultural spaces (Swanson 2000:
28). Most importantly, these were public spaces frequented by women. Curiosity,
far removed from the firm claims to objective knowledge of the public museum
and of science, now belonged to the feminized world of popular consumption
and mass-produced fantasies of luxury. Yet, at least in the United States, the
museum did not stay distant from this world for long, and perhaps was never as
distant as the statements which explicitly rejected curiosity might lead us to
suppose. As H. Glenn Penny writes: ‘scarcity – in the form of the rare, the odd,
the old or the strange – maintained a prominent role in the selection of artefacts
and the designation of their value’ (2002: 80). The museum, like the market,
was driven by the desire to possess, and objects gain value in proportion to the
difficulty in acquiring them.