Page 50 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

34 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

museum (2002: 12–16). The cluttered appearance of natural history museums
was found to be deleterious to visitors’ attention. Visitors seemed distracted,
their attention aimlessly drifting from one object to the next one that caught
their eye. By moving the exhibits into the walls, the museum encouraged the
visitor to be selective and focused, just as the store window was designed to
arrest the drifting attention of the passer-by on the street. The hall of dioramas
makes use of blank empty spaces and dramatic lighting (see Chapter 2 for more
on the habitat diorama).
Interestingly, similar developments were happening in department stores in
the same period. By the 1920s and ’30s, department stores had been modernized,
their interiors architecturally redesigned to maximize light and displays organ-
ized to minimize clutter and encourage the free flow of customers. According to
Neil Harris, by the 1930s stores moved toward lighter interiors, selective and
minimal displays, careful use of blank spaces and lighting, and they attempted
‘to surround the shopper with a sense of adventure and to underline this by the
continual display of new objects’. Harris sees the stores as being ahead of the
museum in this, and as prompting a critique of the museum based on the new
aesthetics of the department store (Harris 1978: 162–4). But in the hall of
dioramas we can see a similar emphasis on discretion and selectivity, and on
the careful organization of space to manage visitor attention. In the art gallery
and the international expositions, free-flow displays were designed to open up
vistas across the space, to organize the traffic patterns of visitors (Staniszewski
1998: 174).
Harris accounts for the changes in the department store on the grounds that
class aspiration was now associated not with ostentation, but with modernism
in architecture and interior décor. The association of the stark clean spaces of
modernism with wealth is based in a changed concept of possession. The
department stores of the interwar years in the US reflected the new association
of modernist aesthetics with social superiority (Harris 1978: 161). But there was
also an educational emphasis. While the hall of dioramas was intended to
communicate an attitude to nature, the department stores were schooling popu-
lar taste. The impact of modernism on mass consumption was supposed to be
to reform the taste of the people on the basis that consumption should be about
discretion, not just accumulation. William Leach describes museums in the
United States as participating in a wider training of the public in a new
‘commercial aesthetic’, an expression of the new commodity culture (1989).
Stephen Conn (1998) argues that the 1920s mark the end of the role of
museum’s primary role in American intellectual life. I discuss his argument in
more detail in the following chapter, but I want to emphasize that the change in
that country’s museums in this period (and related changes in European
museums a little later) was not a shift away from education as such but toward a