In 1906, the New York Times reported on a new exhibition at the monkey house in the Bronx zoo causing a stir among visitors and the press: a human inhabitant. Ota Benga, a 23-year-old Bushman, could be seen in the orang-utan enclosure, where he drew crowds of hundreds who stared at him as he wove hammocks or shot his bow.
This was an age far more gung-ho than our own about taking artefacts, creatures and even living human beings from their contexts, and putting them on display for the entertainment and edification of the masses. Prince Albert’s 1851 Great Exhibition had displayed technological innovations alongside consumer goods and looted colonial treasures, setting off a trend for World Fairs that served both in person and via print media as a kind of populist catalogue of all there is to know about the world. Museums of all kinds flourished over the same era as standard-bearers for culture across Europe and the New World.
But is it intrinsically wrong to display things — or people — in this way? Even in 1906, caging a living human in a monkey enclosure prompted outrage. Since then, though, our discomfort with the objectification this implies has grown much more intense. “What’s the point of museums?” asked the Wellcome Collection recently on Twitter. This was a preamble to announcing the closure of the Wellcome Trust’s Medicine Man exhibition, a large collection of medical artefacts from around the world that had been amassed by the American pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The announcement prompted a furious response, denouncing the move as “infantile and anti-intellectual” and modern museums as “vandalising themselves”. And it’s true that the economic and political power that allowed museum collections to be amassed has come under revisionist scrutiny more recently — as has the worldview that gave rise to museums as a cultural form. The turning-point was the First World War, the conflagration that destroyed high imperial Europe, and set in motion the disintegration of its empires in favour of the Pax Americana we’ve all inhabited since.
More than a century after that hinge moment, today the worldview and geopolitical order that amassed most of our museum collections are denounced as “problematic” — and increasingly subject to “dismantling”. But rather than merely complain, yet again, about “woke” culture war being waged in museums, we should see that the assault this implies on an entire worldview — Enlightenment objectivity — is not without justification. Nor is the “dismantling” of this worldview something that can be halted. But the ongoing assault on what’s left of our 19th-century cultural heritage is less a reflection of moral progress in any absolute sense, than of shifts in the underlying power relations that gave rise to museums in the first place.
In their classical 19th-century form, museums and exhibitions are the quintessential “pop” expression of the Enlightenment worldview. To present something as an exhibit in a museum makes a statement about that thing, and what we can know about it.
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