Extreme Collecting: Dealing with Difficult Objects

Abstract

Sally Price's lecture 'Silences in the Museum', presented at the 2008 WilliamFagg lecture at the British Museum, raised the issue of the muted voicesof objects in ethnographic displays that had been stripped of their right toexpress their difficult histories. Drawing on her recent work Paris Primitive(Price, 2007) - an account of the formation of Chirac's Musee du QuaiBranly - she narrates how anthropologists presided over representationsof objects in contestation with art dealers in terms of whether to portrayethnographic context or aesthetic judgements. Price goes on to suggestthat museums can erase the question of the historicity of collections andpast collecting practices by becoming closed shops or walled institutions,brushing aside the opportunity for the museum to act as a space for culturaldialogue. The result, Price says, is that Chirac's new museum dream presentsvisitors with little knowledge about how collections come to be, or areimagined to be, due to political sensitivities. [extract]