Page 57 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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‘we, the young and strong Futurists’, the sickness of which Nietzsche wrote
was weakness of ‘nature’ or of character, caused by an excess of historical
knowledge and a consequent split between internal character and outward
appearance, a split he saw as characteristically German (1997: 82).
The writer Paul Valéry also associated museums with overaccumulation. His
essay entitled ‘The Problem of Museums’, published in Le Gaulois in 1923,
echoes Marinetti in its description of the battles and conflicts between the
paintings and sculptures in the art museum. Valéry called the museum a ‘house
of incoherence’ and describes the sense of panic and feeling of offence induced
by the placing of incompatible unique works alongside one another. He argued
that ‘modern man’ is ‘impoverished by an excess of riches’. Donations and
legacies to the museum, the continual production of new works, new purchases
and changes in taste and fashion which revive previously dismissed works,
‘incessantly combine to produce an accumulation of excessive and therefore
unusable capital’ (Valéry 1956; see also Adorno 1967: 177). Just as over-
accumulation produces ‘dead’ capital, so an encyclopaedic gathering together
of artworks (for Valéry) or historical knowledge (for Nietzsche) makes those
objects and that knowledge ‘dead’. For both Valéry and Nietzsche, over-
accumulation led to superficiality. Nietzsche wrote that the only way to deal
with the onslaught of new historical knowledge was to embrace it as lightly as
possible (1997: 79). Half a century later, Valéry saw the only options as becom-
ing superficial or becoming erudite. For Valéry (1956), erudition is not a positive
term when applied to art: ‘It substitutes hypotheses for sensation’ so that ‘Venus
becomes a document’. For Nietzsche too, the picture galleries represent a kind
of education that has substituted itself for a real experiential understanding of
art. Education becomes the learning of facts unrelated to experience. The
encyclopaedic inclinations of the Victorian era, in Nietzsche’s view, had the
unfortunate effect that modern people, stuffed with ‘the ages, customs, arts,
philosophies, religions, discoveries of others’, become ‘walking encyclopaedias’
(1997: 79).
A related argument about overaccumulation can be found in the work of the
sociologist Georg Simmel. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Simmel
saw modernity as bombarding the senses of the modern individual, who is
unable to process the wealth of information, goods and sensations on offer.
Consequently the individual either becomes prone to nervous disorders or
confronts modern everyday life with detachment, and an insensitivity to the
differences between things. For the jaded modern, everything is reduced to the
same. In his essay on the Berlin Trade exhibition of 1896, Simmel stated:

Nowhere else is such a richness of different impressions brought together
so that overall there seems to be an outward unity, whereas underneath a