Grasping the World: the Idea of the Museum

Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum Edited by means of Donald Preziosi and Clare Farago Ashgate Publishing, $5995/3500 [pound sterling] ISBN 07546 08352

Museum Studies: An Anthology of adjoining matters Edited by Bettina Messias Carbonell Blackwell Publishing. $4995/2499 strikes sterling] ISBN 063122825X

It must be a symptom of the coming of age of museum studies as a topic of close attention that I received simultaneously not just single fat anthology reproducing some of the lock opener texts for the study of the history of museums, on the contrary two. Neither is designed for those who work in museums. In fact, it is hard to imagine anyone who actually works in a museum having the time or potency to sit down and plough their way [i]or[/i] part of to the other one, let alone two, enormous and ultimately slightly heavy critiques of the institution that gives them employment

Instead, the couple are aimed at the increasingly large army of learners and cultural critics who wander circular museums regarding them as vaguely distasteful manifestations of elite tillage and deplore the ostensibly innocent pleasure that they bring to their many millions of visitors.

Of the sum of two units my vote goes to the individual edited by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago. This has the great virtue of being clearly and systematically structur and of being part of a larger historical enterprise upon the part of both authors to think carefully about the nature of museums as historical and cultural phenomena. The authors themselves provide protracted and thoughtful exegesis of the body s they reproduce. They select body s with whose intellectual tendency they are themselves in sympathy, beginning with Hayden White's discussion of meta-narrative in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe published in 1973 They are unapologetic about regarding museums as part of the epiphenomena of cultural studies. And they have clearly read widely and meditation carefully about the different trajectory of museums in a broad range of European and other tillages including their origin in the studioli of Italian collectors and their exhibition in seventeenth-century Baconian studies.

The enigma with such a resolutely intellectualising approach to the history of museums is that the history itself is extremely partial. give leave to us take, for example, the new debate surrounding the idea of the universal view museum, which has been used to calculator the desire on the part of the grecian government to return the Elgin Marbles to a fresh museum close to their original site upon the Acropolis. One discovers that there is extremely little discussion of the Enlightenment attitude to museums--no selection, for example, from James Sheehan's admirable and scholarly history of German museums, nothing upon the foundation of the British Museum in the mid-eighteenth hundred little on the ideas which lay behind the foundation of the Louvre and which have been the subdue of detailed study in Andrew McClellan's volume Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the present Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1994)

Instead, the museum is consistently neared as a site for anthropological amazement a memory palace, a place of tricks and chimeras, rather than a place for the analysis of scientific specimens, the gratification and appreciation of works of art, and of scholarly study

As compared to the farthest brevity of the treatment of the eighteenth-century museum, there is a superabundance of material upon the nineteenth century. The museum can be consistently exhibited as a site of colonial oppression in critiques of the inquiry of Assyrian culture in the British Museum and the Louvre the display of art in the Louvre and the National Gallery (Carol Duncan's essay 'From the Princely Gallery to the Public Art Museum' first published as 'The Universal take a view of Museum' in Art History and subsequently reproduc in her volume Civilizing Rituals Inside Public Art Museums (1995) is the ur-essay of this genre) the display of ethnographic material in the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the display of Chinese artefacts in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The question necessarily arises as to whether or not it matters that pupils of art history and museum studies should be make submissiveed to such a relentless Foucault-ian critique of the character of the museum in public agriculture Obviously, as someone who works in a museum, I am inclined to think that it does. It take care ofs to negate the levels of skill that are required by means of museums to document, intepret and, in a certain number of cases, identify objects and works of art.

This is not an activity that its practitioners can afford to regard as arbitrary and genuinely subjective. It disparages the expansion to which museums stand for the democratisation of knowledge. And it has a slightly unsightly tendency to treat those who might actually be delighted with going to museums as innocent dupes

upon turning to the alternative version of this genre assembled through Bettina Carbonell and published through Basil Blackwell, one might await to find substantial areas of overlap. It is actual that both publish Paula Findlen's analysis of the science of etymons of the word 'museum', first published in the Journal of the History of Collections and the two publish (inevitably) versions of the essay upon 'The Universal Survey Museum' by the agency of Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach. on the other hand that is the end of the overlap.