Dead Circuses

Abstract

During the last decade, museum curators have become fascinated with the origins of their institutions, both theoretically and practically. Many have reconstructed in a corner of their galleries a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ to show how their formative collections were arranged and displayed. The new Enlightenment Gallery in the British Museum is exceptional only on account of its size – fittingly so, because it is an attempt to transport the visitor back to the birth of the mother of all modern museums. But what is all this backward gazing about? Are these vivid recollections of youth a sign of an approaching end? Have museums outlived their usefulness? Or do museums feel they are in danger of losing their way, and need to go back to their roots to start again? Ken Arnold takes the second view – but then he is a museum curator with a vested interest in these institutions’ survival. This makes his writing more vivid and more authoritative, but his commitment to museums has to be taken into account when considering the case he makes for their future. Museums didn't exist before the Enlightenment (apart from a brief and extremely indistinct appearance in Ancient Greece and Rome) and they still don't exist in most non-Western cultures. There is nothing that says that museums have to continue to exist. They had a purpose, and as both these books make abundantly clear, that purpose has been served.