Page 43 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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From the marketplace to the museum

In museums of natural history, ethnography, and archaeology, new and more
scientific museum practices were developed by applying the principles of
‘experimentation, observation and verification’ to the study of artefacts (Bennett
2002: 37). Through the technical procedures involved in fieldwork, collection,
classification and display, museums process objects, fixing their place in the
community of objects and enabling them to do the work of museum objects.
Using Latour’s work, Bennett argues that museum objects are more than just
bearers of meaning, they are actors performing given roles, and the institution
itself plays the role of stabilizing their relations to non-human and human
actors (2002: 36). The museum director Philip Rhys Jones has compared the
museum to an ‘impresario’ who ‘sets the scene, induces a receptive mood in the
spectator, then bids the actors take the stage’ (cited in Duncan 1995: 12–3).
Like the door-closer discussed above, museum objects become able to
substitute and shape human activity. Through these processes and procedures
the artefact comes to embody history, nature or a particular culture, rather than
simply representing them (see also Watson 1999: 87). Furthermore, the human
labour which turns this material thing into a museum object is concealed from
the visitor, who is invited to perceive it as playing its role without direction
(Bennett 2002: 39–40). The museum is like a theatre – enabling objects to
‘perform’, hiding what goes on ‘backstage’. The properties an artefact gains
through being processed by the museum come to seem its own properties. It is
not difficult to spot a similarity with Marx’s account of commodity fetishism.
The labour that goes into making the object a museum object, is, to use Marx’s
term, ‘congealed’ in the object, which appears to us to ‘come to life’ in the
museum.
In museums that contain once-useful objects (tools, say, or household arte-
facts), the detaching of these objects from their use-value turns them into signi-
fying things: representations of the category to which they are assigned. The
museum processes them in such a way that the visitor, who might encounter
similar things outside the museum and give them little regard, approaches them
as objects of contemplation and instruction, as things which ‘speak’. In the case
of art, the transformation process is more complex, since art is already an
object of contemplation rather than use. However, one of the earliest critiques
of the public museum was based on the notion that art did have a use-value
and that the removal of artworks from its original sites into the museum
destroyed their authenticity (Maleuvre 1999: 17–8). Quatremère de Quincy, a
writer and secretary of the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris, opposed the
establishment of the Louvre and the transformation of art into ‘a practical
course of instruction in modern chronology’ (cited in Belting 2001: 40). For