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Museums: Leisure between State and Distinction
museum. Its function was to effect a visible mechanism of differentiation of the
holder from other competing groups by speaking of his or her refinement,
aloofness, or delicacy. 29 Equally, we could identify events such as the expulsion
of Punch and Judy shows in the 1860s from the site of the National Gallery of
Scotland as evidence of the extrication of carnival from the visual field, leaving
an unsullied space where bourgeois recognized bourgeois, in relative hush. 30
Such movements had, by the early nineteenth century, crystallized into the
normative and institutional distinctions subtending systems of cultural production
arranged around two poles: restricted/high culture versus large-scale/popular
culture. High art was the symbolically potent system of classification valorized
by the appropriate cultural experts, discourses and nationally consecrated institutions
that included orchestras, theaters, and other “serious” civic institutions with
established conventions of public demeanor and cultural restraint. Museums
emerged within this system as an organization of cultural authority, based on the
collective action of elites that bounded them ever closer to consecrated culture.
All this underpinned the sense of belonging of some social groups over others in
the museum – a feeling that was reinforced in the minute details of its internal
functioning:
Everything, in these civic temples in which bourgeois society deposits its most sacred
possessions, that is, the relics inherited from a past which is not its own, in the holy
palaces of art, in which the chosen few come to nurture a faith of virtuosi while
conformists and bogus devotees come and perform a class ritual, old palaces or great
historic homes to which the nineteenth century added imposing edifices, built often in
the Greco-Roman style of civic sanctuaries, everything combines to indicate that the
work of art is as contrary to the world of everyday life as the sacred is to the profane.
The prohibition against touching the objects, the religious silence which is forced upon
visitors, the puritan asceticism of the facilities, always scarce and uncomfortable, the
almost systematic refusal of any instruction, the grandiose solemnity of the decoration
and decorum, colonnades, vast galleries, decorated ceilings, monumental staircases both
outside and inside, everything seems done to remind people that the transition from the
profane world to the sacred world presupposes, as Durkheim says, ‘a genuine metamorphosis.’
31
Free entrance, in short, was also optional entrance, in practice put aside for those
who felt at home in the museum’s confines. The founding of art museums was
inseparable from the struggle of the bourgeois class to elevate its own worldview
while appearing to rise above the realities of material life from the early nineteenth
century. As the bourgeoisie reconciled the stylistic demeanor of the aristocracy
with instrumental reason, it used the aesthetic (one tool among many, incidentally)
to define a space for itself, a sanctuary of high culture that served to produce and
reproduce this class’s claim to the status of cultural superiors of the social system.
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