In a series of richly detailed case studies from Britian, Australia and North America, Tony Bennett investigates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums, fairs and exhibitions have organized their collections, and their visitors. Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, Bennett sheds new light upon the relationship between modern forms of official and popular culture. Using Foucaltian p… More >>
The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics
A glib account of the history of the museum, written in easi-Foucault language which simply adapts the traditional 70s sociological model of ’social control’ – museums form part of the bourgeois plot to control the people, along with schools etc. In the end, the account is nothing more than conspiracy theory.
Rating: 2 / 5
As a museum professional with over twelve years experience designing and producing exhibitions for a wide variety of subject matter i was immediately interested in Tony Bennet’s book. The summary on the back mapped out, in plain english, a book that detailed the social and political forces that resulted in and shaped the modern concept of the museum.
However once i had purchase the book and actually tried to read it I found myself drowning in Foucault -ian language that ultimately obscures any observations that Mr Bennet may have had. This book is only for those with a college degree in philosophy,as it seems more focused on showing us all how clever Mr Bennet is than actually dealing with the subject matter. Completely inaccessible to all but the most acedemic minded scholars
Rating: 1 / 5
Bennett’s language may be theory dense, but it is rarely unclear while outlining the social and cultural trends which gave “birth” to the museum in its many formats, historical, anthropological, art, etc. This book is really a collection of essays previously written by Bennett on the museum and combined here; I would recommend not reading it all at once as it can be a bit much. However, it clearly looks at the historical and social reasons for how the museum came to be, particularly in its nineteenth century origins. It also relates museums to other social institutions: fairs and cabinets of curiosities as precursors, the 19th c. developments in prisons and the advent of expositions as contemporaneous to the birth of the museum, and amusement parks as a mix of the fair and the museum. Definitely located in the field of cultural studies.
Rating: 4 / 5
It’s true (as other reviewers have complained) that Bennett’s analysis can be a little too slick at times. But even if the Foucault-inspired arguments are overstated, this book still offers interesting discussion of specific historical examples. If you take a “social control” theory too literally, this sort of analysis will become wrongheaded. But Bennett and other researchers in this vein are asking serious questions: how do the ways we order and represent knowledge (as museums are designed to do) shape what we can know?
Rating: 4 / 5