A review of
Tony Bennett,
The Birth of the Museum, History, Theory, Politics.
Routledge, London, 1995

Based on versions published in Culturefront, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Summer 1996), p. 66 and in
Museum Management and Curatorship, Vol. 15, No. 2 (June 1996), p. 203.

After its discussion of public policy in Part I, Part II analyzes several contemporary exhibits with an aim to exposing the political and social consequences of biased exhibit design and selection. The goal of Part I, however, is to demonstrate that the modern museum's immediate history reveals a need to control an emerging middle-class population and to inculcate it with civilizing values and the rules of social decorum. At the same time, the museum, as the state's face to the populace, is put into service as a locus from which to project national power and authority. Fused in a binding relationship of micro- macrocosmic proportions, the welfare of the individual was viewed as directly dependent on his domestic and national environment -- including his social and cultural organizations. Although the title of this book is The Birth of the Museum, the museum is investigated not merely in the light of its manifestations as a public institution of science and art, but in the broader context brought to it by comparison with other kinds of public quasi-educational institutions and entertainments. These may range in kind from the amusement park to the fair and to the prison. Part III contains detailed studies of three topics brought together under the rubric, "Technologies of Progress." These include an analysis of the influence of Darwinian science on museum exhibits, a study of how world-class expositions use the metaphor of progress, and finally, an analysis of how a specific amusement park, Blackpool's Pleasure Beach, encodes progress into its iconography of play.

In Part I, organizations from the past and present are examined from a class-based perspective. The author's analysis is not restricted to elucidating the political and social dynamics underlying the creation and meaning of social objects. Tony Bennett goes further. He applies his socio-ethical model with hindsight, assessing the purview of institutions past and present for omissions and imbalances that only seem relevant now. In the illuminating essay of Part III, "Museums and Progress," the consequences of Darwinian evolutionary theory are held responsible for the rationalization of European superiority and for male dominance over women. Here, in contrast to the earlier essays, the author's pointed finger is held in check; rather it is the analysis of exhibits and the elucidation of anthropological philosophies that, in the end, demonstrate the racist and sexist underpinning of this stage of Western cultural anthropology. While Tony Bennett does not impose his political doctrine on his conclusions here, nevertheless, the reader is led to feel that the author has gone further than just exposing the philosophical mechanics that laid the foundation for modern sins. It is obvious that he blames the past for present errors -- the author thinks retrospectively, always judging the past through modern perspectives.

In Part I, "History and Theory," the author's resolute insistence on applying his viewpoint, in asserting its all-encompassing rightness, prevents the examination of issues, conditions, meanings and points of view that do not fit into the author's schematic understanding of cultural institutions. This is unfortunate because Tony Bennett makes many intriguing observations on the relationship between museums, the state and the public, and reveals a keen sensitivity to the way in which modern exhibits transform and control meaning by defining technical or macro-economic structures while ignoring political and social realities. Indeed, the reader should be warned that The Birth of the Museum, is an intricate book addressing more themes than summarized here. The author's thesis is complexly argued and assumes the reader is familiar with the historiography of cultural anthropology. Unfortunately its style and these assumptions make this work all the more impenetrable to the general reader. Further, this book contains sentences and thoughts of such intentional complexity that comprehension is often near impossible. In places the book is poorly edited. Incomplete sentences, unnecessary neologisms (foregrounded, exoticized) and typographical errors are not uncommon. If the reader can make it through or ignore the author's linguistic traps he will find much original and interesting research on the social and political dimensions of opening museums to the public, plus many perceptive if provocative observations about the current cultural milieu.

Propelled by an abiding disdain for anything that speaks of "elitism" or that claims value for the sensibilities of high culture, the author embodies a point of view which all but forces his mind to close itself to any agenda except that which interprets the world as a struggle for power among the classes. At times he comes dangerously close to the paranoid notion that high cultures were invented in order to keep the low-culture masses in their place. To him, cultural institutions, the way they use art, if not the art, itself, serve these ends. Tony Bennett contends that art has visible and invisible properties. The invisible is that which is known to the high-brow cognoscenti in whose interest it is to keep the working class ignorant of the invisible coded content. Ignorance, it seems, is due to the control of the powerful; it is never attributed to a limitation in motivation or will of the observer. Knowledge of art, he maintains, is used as a wall with which to keep the working classes in their place. Without doubt, Tony Bennett's views are drawn from English working class experience, but viewed from an American perspective, few of these ideas make any sense. American society (exceptions noted) has traditionally placed great value on allowing individuals to change class by the acquisition of knowledge (and/or money). By American credo, it would seem, in continual revolution, the arts of any class may potentially be elevated into spheres of equivalent significance. Similarly, any art is potentially available to any member of any class, be there will, initiative and ability -- or so says the myth by which we live.

It is ironic that the author's world-view, so ardently but affectedly argued in the historical first part of the book, is so much more attractively and compellingly presented in the second part. It is here that Tony Bennett examines current historical exhibits and history museums, assesses the consequence of their design and contrasts the museum model to its social and political prototype. The application of Tony Bennett's methodology to specific instances and occurrences holds a greater opportunity for success than his strained and unconvincing efforts to interpret the past in the reflection of current political philosophies. Consequently, this reviewer recommends that readers begin their reading with Part II, "Policies and Politics," proceed to Part III, and return later (if at all) to the historical and theoretical discussion and analysis with which the study begins. In other words, proceed from the concrete to the hypothetical, from the specific to the general.

The author's focus in Part I is aimed less on investigating the mechanics of the birth and the development of the museum or on its typological precedents, than it is on how the modern state learned to use the museum, public demonstrations and public spaces as tools with which to exercise power and inculcate its view of national civilization. As such it looks at institutions from the outside looking in, and to this reviewer, consequently fails to grasp the essence, significance and relevance of the various disciplines that any particular institution embodies. The essays in Part I do not look at museums from the points of view of artists, historians, curators and visitors. They do not consider the benefit of natural history museums to the advancement of our knowledge of the natural world (however flawed). They refuse to see fairs as institutions to be enjoyed and parks as locales for relaxation. Not viewed from the user's viewpoint, in these preliminary essays such institutions appear to be nothing more than the cynical, but sophisticated manifestations of the political goals and agendas of the dominant classes in their effort to control, mold and reform those under them.

Its technique of looking at museums, fairs and other forms of public exhibitions as manifestations of a state or societal need to articulate the principles by which it claimed responsibility for its population and hegemony over it, conflicts with the experiences and motives of the inquisitive museum-goer and second-guesses the motives of the professional museologist and discipline specialists. Lacking most of all, is an empathetic appreciation of the significance of museum collections, their arrangements, exhibits and contextual constructions. These lacunae, save the empathy, are addressed, at long last, in Part III, but by then it is too late; the reader has already been exposed to the author's nihilism. The study of the influence of Darwinian evolution on museum exhibit theory only reinforces the reader's impression. Indeed, Tony Bennett readily admits that he originally felt like an outsider in museums and that the lessons they provided were alien to him. From this view he asks the reader to join him in complicity as he looks at historical museological phenomena from outside the picture window, as an unsympathetic suspicious rejected outsider -- perhaps as a self imposed outcast. When viewed as a symbol of power, as a device intended to transform values and to inculcate the lessons of "civilized" society, the author has no difficulty in comparing museums to prisons. The difference between them is not a function of purpose; it is only a matter of form.

The author's technique is to look at each evolutionary elaboration of modern exhibit science, each forward-looking step in museology, as evidence of a innate and intrinsic fault within society. In these studies the consequences of progress have (by inference) tainted modern opinion, government, economics and its adjunct institutions. While this technique may be useful to modern ethicists and polemicists, to historians it is flawed because it fails to comprehend any institution on its own terms. It fails to consider what issues drew the attention of a period's protagonists and how they reacted to their own past and defined their own era. In Tony Bennett's potentially influential book we never see that so-called progress can be good and useful, instead we are treated to evidence that seeks to show that the dominant society corrupts its institutions and manipulates their missions.

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