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Nick Prior
double-coded, ambivalent. Historically, it has oscillated between contrasting sets
of values and exhibited apparently self-contradictory behavior – inward-looking
elitism and populist democratic pedagogy, religiosity and secularism, traditionalism
and modernity. 2 The coupling of these cultural and political coordinates has
had particular implications for the function of the museum visit and to the
meanings attached to the social groups who have participated – willfully or not –
in the museological encounter.
The first section of the chapter will utilize a Bourdieusian framework to deal
with how the museum had been constructed as a sanctuary of high culture and
refinement, elevated to an exclusive position beyond the collective. The second
section will detail the opening up of museums at the behest of nation-states,
integrating their populations into national culture via utilitarian programmes of
social regulation and improvement. The institutional space opened up by this latter
process, it will be argued, was enough to allow a certain leakage of the popular
into the museum in a way that fissured the project of the museum even further.
In the course of this chapter, I will not enter into nuanced particularities on the
mechanics of specific nations, their museums, or visitors. I hope, instead, to sketch
a broader canvas that takes in the early history of the museum in Europe in order
to reveal the two defining principles of power which gave the museum its modus
operandi in the nineteenth century. Of course, not all museums in Europe functioned
in quite the same way; meaningful differences exist, for instance, between
provincial museums and national museums, continental European museums and
British picture galleries, early-nineteenth-century museums and late-nineteenthcentury
museums. Still, there is some merit in capturing the general strokes that
patterned the evolution of many large-scale museums in Europe. The fact that
nearly all major European countries possessed a large, public museum by the first
few decades of the nineteenth century must at least alert us to the unifying contours
that link different European cases. There is also a burgeoning critical literature,
born of interdisciplinary urgencies, charting the genesis and development of
specific museums and art galleries. 3
In his short essay, “The Problem of Museums,” the French poet and essayist Paul
Valéry defines museums as places “where Aphrodite is transformed into a
dossier.” 4 It is absurd, complains Valéry, to reduce the “marvellous actuality” of
things to a singular tableau in which is gathered together disparate objects that do
most damage to each other when they are forced to be alike. Museums, by their
very nature, fail to kindle much in the way of delight because they belong to the
order of taxonomy, conservation and public improvement. Direct feelings are
quashed, to be replaced by a calculated superficiality and frigidity. “At the first
step that I take toward things of beauty,” he writes, “a hand relieves me of my stick,
and a notice forbids me to smoke.” As he proceeds the museum is revealed in all
its ambiguous glory and Valéry is “smitten with a sacred horror”:
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