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Museums: Leisure between State and Distinction
redolent in the organization of the Altes Museum in Vormärz Berlin spoke of a
logic of separation and exclusion in the nineteenth century. The Altes Museum
served to establish the authority of the political administrators of cultural reform
as the arbiters of taste and distinction. This separated the refined from the common,
engendering in the latter “an attitude of awe, wonder and quasi-religious respect.” 18
Indeed, an artifice used by Schinkel to promote such a mood of “sacred solemnity”
was to arrange his classical sculpture on very high pedestals in order to place the
visitor on a plane spiritually inferior to that of the sacred objects.
In other museums, undifferentiated public access was fiercely countered by
artists and curators faithful to the idea that unmediated or popular access spoilt
the silent contemplation of the works of art. As Thackeray was to write in 1841:
“Genteel people . . . do not frequent the Louvre on a Sunday. You can’t see the
pictures well, and are pushed and elbowed by all sorts of low-bred creatures.” 19
Across Europe, museums still implemented restricted hours of opening that
discouraged working people from attending and audience screening was a widely
used method of discriminating between the studious and the plebeian, favor lying
with scholarly and artistic patronage. 20 Sir Henry Ellis’s belligerent response to
suggestions that the British Museum might be opened to the “vulgar classes” on
popular holidays in 1835, for instance, is telling: “I think,” he replied, “the most
mischievous portion of the population is abroad and about at such a time . . . the
exclusion of the public is very material, inasmuch as the place otherwise would
really be unwholesome.” 21
When the lower ranks were admitted they were done so in carefully regulated
conditions. In Edinburgh, the Royal Museum of Scotland opened on New Year’s
Day in 1852, experimentally, to “the working classes.” Groups of one hundred
were shepherded into the museum space and a bell rung after twenty-five minutes
signaling them to leave, to be replaced by a proceeding group. 22 Admission was
free, but only on possession of a ticket – a condition intended to bar “improper
individuals.” Several years later guards at the National Gallery of Scotland were
asked to be particularly vigilant towards children and “disorderly visitors” who
might attempt to “ascertain the surface” of the pictures (clearly, those who could
not control the limits of their bodies were not “civilized”); while officers were
empowered to refuse admittance to “suspicious characters.” 23 In London, connoisseurs
and critics of the National Gallery such as Cockerell, Unwins, and
Waagen riled against “persons, whose filthy dress tainted the atmosphere with a
most disagreeable smell.” 24 And in Russia, looking the part was a precondition of
acceptance into the Hermitage up until the 1860s, initial directives stipulating that
visitors had to acquire an admission ticket and wear regimental or aristocratic
attire. 25
For Bourdieu, such museological discriminations make sense if we recognize
the role of high culture as fulfilling certain social functions of legitimizing social
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