Page 52 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Exhibitions of design expose the tenuousness of the distinction between an
‘authentic’ aesthetic experience in the museum and commodity aesthetics. Since
the 1940s, exhibitions of design and of everyday objects have been involved in
schooling taste (some of these exhibitions are discussed in the final section of
Chapter 2). More recently, museum staff have expressed concern at architecture
and design companies which treat contemporary art museums as places to
showcase their work and increase commissions (Rectanus 2005). In these cir-
cumstances, and particularly in an environment of increased privatization and
dependence on corporate money, the line between museum and marketplace
becomes ever more blurred. However, it is in the museum shop that the two
come together most perfectly:
The immediate gratification felt by the department store customer in the
act of purchase, and the experience of handling objects and learning more
about them, which was the joy of the fair-goer, are united in the museum
store, and seal the museum-going experience for many visitors. Appropri-
ately enough in our culture, it is a commercial setting which legitimises an
aesthetic setting.
(Harris 1978: 172)
The shop legitimizes the museum by inserting its objects into the world of taste
and fashion, giving them a new life in reproduction, and returning them to the
world of commodity circulation. This consolidates a longstanding relationship
between the museum and the market. As I have suggested, the museum age is
also a period of rapid growth in the circulation of commodities and of the
development of new forms of attention. The museum in the modern period
both emerges from, and produces, new relationships with things. The next
chapter takes this argument further, examining modernist critiques of the
acquisitive, overcrowded museum, and considering more closely some of the
exhibition strategies which were devised to reinvent the museum.

Further reading

Fisher, P. (1991) Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of
Museums. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Belting, H. (2001) The Invisible Masterpiece. London: Reaktion Books.
Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1992) Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London:
Routledge.