Conceptualizing the History of the Contemporary Museum: On Foucault and Benjamin

Author(s): Norton Batkin

Source: Philosophical Topics , SPRING 1997, Vol. 25, No. 1, Aesthetics (SPRING 1997), pp.
1-10
Published by: University of Arkansas Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43154248

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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS
VOL. 25 NO. 1, SPRING 1997

Conceptualizing the History

of the Contemporary Museum:
On Foucault and Benjamin1

Norton Batkin
Bard College

I want to discuss here two models for conceptualizing the historical

antecedents of the modern museum. The first model, the predominant one in
recent writing about the history of the museum, derives its concepts, if not
its methods, from Foucault, in particular from The Order of Things (1966;
English translation, 1970) and from The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969;
English translation, 1972). This model or approach to understanding the his-
tory of the museum appears both in recent writing in museum studies and in
self-avowed "postmodernist," critical accounts of the museum; for example,
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill's book Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge
(1992) and Douglas Crimp's essay "On the Museum's Ruins" (1980).2
The second model I will discuss, which I am particularly interested in,
for what I might call "practical" or "pedagogical" as well as philosophical
reasons, I take from Walter Benjamin's well-known essay "The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936; English translation, 1969).3
To my knowledge, this essay, while it is widely cited in discussions of the
visual arts, has not been the basis for any study of the history of museums.4
Later, I will say more about my "practical" and "pedagogical" interests in
Benjamin's essay. For now I will note that my interest in these two models

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for conceptualizing the history of museums - one based in Foucault, the other
in Benjamin - arises from the fact that each emphasizes a different aspect of
museum practice - and each has very different implications for our concep-
tions of the role and importance of the museum in contemporary society.
I want to begin discussing the first model for the study of the history of
the museum, the model derived from Foucault, by asking two questions. (1)
Can Foucault's methods and ideas - specifically, what he calls the "histori-
cal analysis of the transformation of discourse"5 - be applied to the history
of the visual arts, or, if not to the history of these arts themselves (because
works of visual art are not "discursive functions"), can these methods and
ideas be applied to the history of art historical inquiry? (2) Can Foucault's
methods and ideas be applied to the institution of the museum as an institu-
tion of collecting, display, education, and so on? The "and so on" here is
meant to leave open the question of what it is that museums do - more par-
ticularly, what ends they (set out to) serve. For example, in performing their
tasks of collecting, display, and education, museums have served, in differ-
ent ways at different moments, various ideological ends, whether these be
nationalistic, political, or art historical (or, again, other). Not all of these ends
become ends of museums through the art and artifacts that they store and
display. Museums are social institutions, and their purposes are in part
defined by social, cultural, economic, and political forces that will affect the
museum and the way it is perceived whether these forces work upon or apart
from the activities that enter the museum's daily functioning (collecting, sci-
entific inquiry, art historical inquiry).
Why do I separate these questions, particularly since the origins, any-
way the history, of art historical inquiry and of the museum are likely inter-
twined? For one thing, although art history and the museum might both be
spoken of as "institutions," they plainly are institutions of different sorts. Art
history is an intellectual discipline, defined primarily by its written achieve-
ments. The museum is an institution of collection and display, that is, its activ-
ities involve the manipulation (handling of, care for) and disposition (setting
out, arrangement) of particular objects. Of course, museums catalogue the
objects they collect, publish accounts of them, and display them with inter-
pretive and object labels. But a museum's collections and its exhibitions,
while they may be accompanied and interpreted by texts, are not themselves
texts, at least they are not so in the most straightforward sense in which, for
example, an interpretive label is a text. Does the difference noted here
between art history and the museum, hedged as it may be, matter?
Foucault's work The Archaeology of Knowledge, which offers a general
account of the historical methodology of his first three works - Madness and
Civilization (1961; English translation, 1965), The Birth of the Clinic (1963;
English translation, 1973), and The Order of Things6 - distinguishes what

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Foucault calls "archaeology" from other modes of historical analysis by
defining its particular objects of study. In ascending order, these are "dis-
cursive formations," knowledge (savoir), "archaeological territories," and
the episteme ? The most basic unit of archaeological analysis is the "discur-
sive formation," which is, in the simplest terms, a group of statements.
Plainly, art history, as we have defined it, would appear to be a candidate for
archaeological analysis in Foucault's sense. The museum, on the other hand,
would not. A museum might be an institution in which particular discursive
formations arise or in which they function or are transformed, but a
museum - understood as an institution of collection and exhibition - is not
itself a discursive formation.8
Of course, art history is itself a mode of historical analysis. In the terms
of Foucault's anatomy of such modes in The Archaeology of Knowledge, art
history is more closely allied to the history of ideas than to archaeology. The
history of ideas addresses questions of originality and precession (Foucault
1972: 142-43), whereas archaeology, which analyses discursive formations,
that is, the relations among statements, is not concerned with "merit" (who
originated a thought or practice, or who merely followed) (Foucault 1972:
144). Again, where the history of ideas seeks "principles of cohesion" -
notions of underlying forms of consciousness, "period," and "tradition" -
archaeological analysis locates and describes contradictions within and
between discursive formations (Foucault 1972: 149ff.). So even if art history
might be a candidate for archaeological analysis, in ways that the museum is
not, the archaeology of art history will be a very different study - in its object,
its methods, and its results - from the studies found in art history itself.9
I note these differences between the conceptions and methods of art his-
tory and those of Foucault's archaeological analysis because they are of par-
ticular significance for the recent studies of the history of museums I
mentioned at the outset. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill's Museums and the
Shaping of Knowledge, which sets out to apply the methods and results of
Foucault's "effective history" to the history of museums, helps us to see some
shortcomings of earlier accounts of the "origins" of museums, accounts
which take their terms (including "origin") and their preoccupations (for
example, with continuity) from art history. Hooper-Greenhill points up the
simplified and distorted picture these accounts offer of certain acknowledged
predecessors of the modern museum: the Palace of the Medicis in the fif-
teenth century; the late-sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century "cabinet
of the world," including the Kunstkammer of Rudolph II in the Prague
Castle;10 the late-seventeenth-century Repository of the Royal Society; and
the Louvre, founded as the Museum Français in 1792. In particular, she indi-
cates ways in which current conceptions of art and of science and our pre-
sent division of museums into museums of art, museums of natural history,

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and so on, has led earlier historians of the museum to overlook important
ways in which the predecessors of the modern museum arose out of very dif-
ferent interests in collecting than our own and very different ways of under-
standing nature and art (if, indeed, anything like this distinction can be
marked in the earliest examples Hooper-Greenhill discusses).
The principal problem I have with Hooper-Greenhill's discussions is the
simplistic way in which she applies Foucault's notions to these early col-
lections ("cabinets of curiosities," repositories, and so on) by tracing within
each the elements of one or another of Foucault's epistemes (that is, "the
Renaissance episteme " in the case of the fifteenth-century Medici Palace and
the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century "cabinets of the world";
"the classical episteme " in the case of the Repository of the Royal Society;
and "the modern episteme " in the case of the Louvre). Complications that
arise as she "analyzes" each type of collection lead her to note difficulties in
applying Foucault's epistemes to particular types of collection.11 But these
complexities are matters of detail. What I mean in saying that Hooper-
Greenhill's analysis is simplistic is that it is not itself "archaeological." For
example, she does not consider how the particular collections she discusses
may themselves give rise to or transform elements of an episteme ; that is,
how they may affect the development of particular discursive formations.
Rather, she treats the collections as expressions or exemplifications of epis-
temes already defined somewhere else, in some arena outside the collections.
Methodologically, she uses the notion of an " episteme " as if it were a con-
cept in the history of ideas, a notion more or less synonymous with that of a
"world view" (Weltanschauung).
There are other things, beyond those discussed by Hooper-Greenhill,
that we might learn about the history of museums by taking as models of his-
torical analysis Foucault's analyses of discursive formations and of modern
institutions of control (the asylum, the hospital, the prison). For example, it
has been observed that the major public art museums founded in the United
States in the late nineteenth century were "one term in an organization of
public institutions" that included free libraries, general hospitals, homes for
abandoned children, poorhouses, and houses of correction; that those who
urged the founding of the museums were often the same individuals who
urged the founding of these educational, correctional, and other "relief' insti-
tutions; and that the missions of the several institutions were conceived in
corresponding terms. The public museum was meant not just to educate, but
to improve the general populace, to offer moral examples, not just knowl-
edge.12 Of course, the perspective on the contemporary public art museum
urged by such observations as these is importantly one informed by Foucault.
Yet while there may be much to learn by studying the museum and its
history along lines suggested by Foucault, I think that much of what has been

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written to date under his influence has been, in an important respect, limited
in its perspective. What I mean here is that this work, for the most part, has
started from the notion of the museum as a collection . 13 One thing this work
only barely addresses, something the notion of the museum as a collection
apparently occludes or obscures, is the fact and the history of exhibition .14
What I mean by the fact of exhibition is the fact that works of visual art
are presented for our viewing and judging. This fact, by virtue of its associ-
ation with the facts of viewing and of judging, in one sense can be said to
have a history just because those facts do. Indeed, what I am calling the fact
of exhibition - the fact that works are presented to our view - may itself be
of artistic or critical or philosophical importance at crucial junctures in those
histories, junctures at which the viewing or the judging of works of art have
become matters of explicit concern, that is, in some way problematic, for
artists, critics, or philosophers. This needs to be established, case by case.
But it seems likely, to take one instance, that the pictorial concerns in eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century French painting that Michael Fried has
explored in terms of notions of theatricality and absorption are concerns that
arise out of, anyway arise with, a more explicit consciousness of the fact that
paintings (specifically, portable easel paintings) are presented to our view,
put on view. (If we take the history of the fact of exhibition to begin only
when it becomes a matter of conscious concern that works are presented, put
on view, this history may well have its beginnings relatively late in the his-
tory of the visual arts - perhaps at the moment at which we first can speak
of something like an exhibition in the ordinary sense, for example, the French
Salon. Before this, even though works are made to be viewed, there is noth-
ing that we might call a concept of exhibition.)
In one sense, then, the fact - and the concept - of exhibition can be said
to have a history, one tied up with the history of notions of theatricality, pic-
torial unity, taste, beauty, disinterestedness, and so on.15 Yet there is also
another sense or another way in which we can trace a history of exhibition.
Here what is under study is not so much the fact or the concept of exhibition
as its practices or modes, the specific ways in which works are exhibited. It is
this history that is addressed in Benjamin's discussion of what he calls "exhi-
bition value." Benjamin's specific interest in the increasing importance of exhi-
bition value in the arts - of the desire, as he puts it, "to bring things 'closer'"
(Benjamin, 1969: 223) - has to do with the ways that this desire is met and,
in turn, fed by the discovery of those technologies that he groups under the
term "mechanical reproduction." But this desire also finds an outlet, from the
end of the eighteenth centuiy, in the founding of public art museums.
The public art museum gathers works of art that have originated in vastly
different social, cultural, religious, and political circumstances into a single
location so they can be viewed by the museum's visitors. Its ability to do this

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arises from the fact that works of visual art can be transported, a fact that is
not simple, but itself has a history. From the inception of easel painting, the
fact of portability evidences artists' interests in a broader public and in what
Benjamin terms the exhibition value of the work of art. But what interests an
artist might have in the exhibition of his or her work may be quite specific -
aesthetically, socially, politically, or philosophically - and so different from
the interests that other artists, at other moments and in different circum-
stances, might have in the exhibition of their work.
In collecting works, the art museum exploits all the interests and motives
that underlie the exhibition value of works of art; that is, all the different
interests that have led to these works being made portable - or that have
given them specific size or shape or content, in their address to their specific
audiences.16 The museum exploits these interests in exhibition even if, in its
own exhibitions, it rarely makes these interests explicit, beyond those that
might be seen in the works themselves, if any viewer now is able to recog-
nize them. The museum, while it takes advantage of what Benjamin calls the
exhibition value of the works it gathers, exhibits them under the domination
of a later age's interests in exhibition, the interests of the present museum
audience. (This audience's interests, tinged by a nostalgia for the tradition
of art, may even impose a kind of cult value on art of the past.)17
On the conception of the museum that I have taken here from Benjamin,
what Benjamin calls the "exhibition value" of works of art is the basis of the
museum's collections, not the reverse. To understand the museum, at least
the public art museum that appears in the late eighteenth century, we must
first understand its exploitation and transformation of our interests in exhi-
bition. It is these interests that have given rise to works that could be put on
display, that had to be moveable ("portable"), and, therefore, could be col-
lected, amassed.
I mentioned at the start that I have "practical" and "pedagogical" as well
as philosophical interests in the model of the museum that I take from
Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
What I mean here is more or less straightforward. I presently direct and teach
in a graduate program that trains curators of contemporary art. At least in the
United States - which in the case of the contemporary visual arts means
metropolitan centers such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles - the
issues that are the most demanding, intellectually and practically, for cura-
tors of contemporary art are issues of exhibition. To some extent this is due
to the increasing importance, particularly in these centers, of issues of audi-
ence, including issues of social and ethnic diversity. But it also is a conse-
quence of other factors in the recent history of museums and of the
contemporary visual arts. New patterns of museum funding in the 1960s, in
particular, new possibilities of federal and state support, mandated new atten-

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tion by museums to their general attendance, if not their general public, and
fostered new exhibition formats, such as the "blockbuster" exhibition. At the
same time, increasing audiences for the arts generally, as well as the new pos-
sibilities of funding, enabled artists and independent arts professionals to
develop new venues for exhibition, for example, artists spaces - but also
venues outside the museum or gallery altogether. (An example of the latter
is Mary Jane Jacob's 1986 warehouse exhibition of works by Jannis Kounellis
for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago [1986-87]. Exhibition pro-
jects outside the museum also appeared in Europe; for example, Klaus
Bussmann and Kasper König's Skulptur Projekte in Münster [1977, 1987]
and Jan Hoet's exhibition Chambre d'amis [Ghent, 1986].) Of course, the
work being produced by artists after the 1960s itself often resisted, in one or
another way, traditional museum exhibition formats.
The exhibition, rather than the collection, remains the fundamental inter-
est of the curator of contemporary art even, I think, in those recent instances
in which an artist's installation or a curator's exhibition dwells on the his-
tory of museum collections or on the politically and culturally problematic
objects that have been hidden (I want to say "suppressed") in a museum's
storerooms. (I am thinking here particularly of Fred Wilson's exhibition pro-
ject Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society [1992-93].)
From a practical point of view, that is, from the point of view of the cura-
tor working in the contemporary museum - or working outside or against
it - the principal concerns of curatorial work are concerns with exhibition.
Questions of writing and scholarship and questions of institutional influence
are all mediated by these concerns rather than a concern with the museum's
collections. From this practical point of view, Benjamin's interests in exhi-
bition value - and the possibilities of basing a history of the museum in it -
are important for the forming of a self-reflective curatorial practice. It is to
the history of exhibition, not the history of collections, that we must look if
we are to understand what curators (and artists) now do in the museum and
why they do it. As I have suggested here, somewhat sketchily, the model of
the museum based in Foucault, at least as it has been elaborated to date,
directs our attention elsewhere than to exhibition.18
I will conclude, for now, with a caution. I do not think that the model of
the museum based in Benjamin that I offer as an alternative to the model
based in Foucault is likely to be any less critical of or any less problematic
for contemporary museum practice, particularly if we grant Benjamin's con-
ception of the transformations in exhibition value wrought by mechanical
reproduction and, especially, photography. As I have noted, museums for the
most part do not make explicit the history of exhibition value. They do not
reveal how the works they display have come to be on display - that, for
example, the interests that an artist once had in presenting his or her works

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no longer are well served by the ways these works are now presented. This
was true even before the advent of photomechanical reproduction. After the
advent of photomechanical reproduction, it is true of virtually every object
shown in the museum. We all now see works in the museum under the influ-
ence of photography.19

NOTES

1. This paper, originally entitled "Two Models of the Museum," was presented at the con-
ference "Modernity and After," held in Prague in June 1995 and sponsored by the
Department of History and Philosophy of Art and Architecture at the Central European
University. I wish to thank Tomáš Vlček and David Sparandara for their invitation to par-
ticipate in the conference.
2. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge,
1992); Douglas Crimp, "On the Museum's Ruins," in On the Museum's Ruins
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 42-64. Another recent work that presents a view
of the museum influenced by Foucault is Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern
American Art in a Culture of Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). A
common thread running through these three works is their preoccupation with what Crimp
calls "the absolute heterogeneity the museum gathers together" (52).
3. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books,
1969), 217-51; hereafter referred to as Benjamin 1969.
4. One reason this may be so is that the implications of the terms of Benjamin's essay for
such a history are obscured by the fame of André Malraux's "Museum Without Walls,"
the first part of his book The Voices of Silence (French edition [as Psychologie de l'art],
1947-50; English translation, 1949, 1950). Malraux's arguments appear in some respects
to parallel Benjamin's, but do not, I think, offer as penetrating an analysis of the history
of the visual arts and of the museum.

5. Michel Foucault, 'The Archeology of Knowledge," interview by Jean-Jacques Brochier,

in Michel Foucault, Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New
York: Semiotext(e), 1989, 1996), 58.
6. The French titles are as follows: L'archéologie du savoir, Folie et déraison, Naissance
de la clinique, and Les mots et les choses.
7. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 117 ("discursive formation"), 182-84 ("knowledge,"
"archaeological territories"), 191 ("the episteme "). The Archaeology of Knowledge will
hereafter be referred to as Foucault 1972.

8. I note here that while Foucault speaks of an "archaeology" of medical perception or of

the human sciences or of knowledge (savoir), he speaks of the "birth" of the clinic or of
the prison. "Archaeology" is a study of things that have been said, not (in the first place)
a study of institutions.
I also note that in The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault contrasts "archaeology"
with "anthropology" (see Foucault 1972: 7). He thus speaks of "archaeology" not so much
to invoke a notion of origin (arche) or to signal his adherence to an "archaeological epis-
temology," as Eugenio Donato suggests, but precisely to mark a contrast with an earlier,
humanist conception of history. In this respect, Eugenio Donato's notion that "Foucault's
epistemology is rooted in the epistemology of the Enlightenment he describes so well"
seems to me to be plainly mistaken. See Eugenio Donato, "The Museum's Furnace: Notes
toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet," in Textual Strategies :

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 Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1979), 220, 227.
9. I am thinking of art history here as it has been practiced after Riegl, Wölfflin, Warburg,
Panofsky, et al. I do not know if there exists anything like an art history (a study of works
of art) informed by Foucault's archaeological methods. As I already have suggested, it is
difficult to conceive how a method of studying discursive formations might be applied to
the visual arts, even where the history of the visual arts manifests the sorts of discontinu-
ity, rupture, limit, and the like, that are the particular concern of Foucault's archaeology.
(An instance of discontinuity and rupture might be found, for example, in painting and the
newly emerging technologies of photography in the early nineteenth century. But to sub-
ject these visual media to archaeological analysis, we must treat them as discursive - that
is, as having the structure of modes of communication, of exchange. Are painting and pho-
tography simply or even importantly discursive in this sense? Is their production and devel-
opment informed by the interests that inform discourses of knowledge [savoir]!)
10. Hooper-Greenhill also discusses in this category the "memory theater" of Giulio Camillo,
constructed for the French monarch Francis I; the studiolo in Florence of the Grand Duke
Francesco I; the several Kunstkammern of the Hapsburgs; the smaller-scale Kunstschränke
built by the merchant Philip Hainhofer of Augsberg; the "museums" of Aldrovandi,
Giganti, and Imperato in Italy; and the garden of the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati.
1 1 . See the respective conclusions of Hooper-Greenhill's discussion of each type of museum.
12. See Andrea Fraser, "Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk," October 57 (Summer 1991):
108-10. The cited remark about the museum "as one term in an organization of public
institutions" is from llOn. 13.

13. Foucault's particular concerns in The Order of Things - with taxonomy, with the repre-
sentation and classification of objects - may encourage this understanding of the museum,
in part by encouraging attention to just those precedents studied by Hooper-Greenhill: the
"cabinet of curiosities" or the repository of the amateur scientific association, as opposed,
for example, to the medieval church, the eighteenth-century Salon, the nineteenth-century
independent exhibition, and so on.
14. Despite the importance of the public art exhibition at particular moments in the history
of painting and sculpture, for instance, in the development of French Impressionism or
Russian constructivism, it has not been seen by art historians as a subject in its own right,
demanding its own history. Recent interest in the public of art and in art's critical recep-
tion has led to new attention to exhibitions. See Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public
Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985);
Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of
1855 and 1867 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987); and the anthologies,
The Triumph of Art for the Public (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1979) and The Art
of All Nations : 1850-1873 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1981), both edited by
Elizabeth Gilmore Holt and both subtitled The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics.
Nonetheless, the history of exhibition as a history of the institutional practices of pre-
senting art remains relatively unexplored territory. For example, there are as yet few stud-
ies of how changes in artistic production - in the genres or formats of works of art - have
brought about changes in the exhibition practices of museums or led to the development
of new exhibition venues.

Two noteworthy examples of art historical studies exploring specific curatorial or insti-
tutional practices of presenting art and the relations between these and particular artistic
developments are Martha Ward's study of Impressionist exhibitions, "Impressionist
Installations and Private Exhibitions," Art Bulletin (Dec. 1991): 599-622, and Rosalind
Krauss's study of the relation between the "white cube" exhibition space and minimalist
art, "The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum," October 54 (Fall 1990): 3-17.
Other recent studies of exhibition include Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition:
New Art in the 20th Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), and Brian O'Doherty,
Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: The Lapis Press,
1986).

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 15. For the history of notions of theatricality, pictorial unity, taste, and so on, see Svetlana
Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1983); Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators : Humanist Observers
of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1971); Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century
Italy : A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1972); Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age
of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Fried, 'Thomas Couture and
the Theatricalization of Action in 19th Century Painting," Artforum 8 (June 1970): 36-46;
Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1985); and David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and
the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
16. The art museum also exploits other political and cultural circumstances (circumstances
of conquest or diplomacy) that allow particular works of art to be brought to the museum
(even, in instances, works that are not, in the sense used in the text, "portable").
17. I might, more accurately, speak in the plural - of present museum audiences -
acknowledging the possibility that there are differences among the members of the audi-
ence for the visual arts, differences that affect individual reception of the arts. But exhi-
bitions themselves rarely acknowledge such differences.
18. I think there are reasons that this model is limited in the way I have described, reasons
that have less to do with the nature of the subject of the inquiry (the museum) than with
the particular circumstances of recent intellectual history. For one, those who would write
the history of the museum looking to Foucault have looked primarily to his early works,
which address issues of representation and of knowledge rather than issues that might
more particularly concern the museum, which puts objects on display. Foucaulťs early
works may not provide any easy access to the question of how we might study visual
expression as opposed to discursive knowledge. (Martin Jay's discussion of Foucaulťs
ambivalence toward the category of the visual may be important here. See Martin Jay,
Downcast Eyes : The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993].) Again, Foucaulťs particular interests
in The Order of Things may have led Eilean Hooper-Greenhill and Douglas Crimp, as it
may lead others, to emphasize specific antecedents of the modern museum - especially
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities - and to emphasize in particu-
lar the ways that these early "museums" organized their collections, as opposed to the
ways that they put their collections on view or, as often, hid them from view. These spe-
cific antecedents of the modern museum, when regarded in the light of Foucaulťs con-
cerns in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, have seemed to suggest
that the peculiarities of the museum are a result of the heterogeneity of its collections -
rather than, say, the fact that it attempts to put the known world on display.
19. The situation is more complex than I sketch it here. Has the museum become a monu-
ment to photography's domination of the arts? So much might be suggested by Benjamin's
and Malraux's thoughts about photography. But on Benjamin's conception of exhibition
value, we might also say that photography is itself the apotheosis of exhibition, hence of
the museum. I begin to tease out this second thought about photography in an essay I
wrote for a conference on the work of Stanley Cavell. See my "Photography, Exhibition,
and the Candid," Common Knowledge 5 (1996): 145-65. There I suggest that Benjamin's
idea that exhibition is the condition or, as I put it, the characteristic mode, of photogra-
phy arises from his viewing photography from the perspective of painting. So-called pic-
torial photographers at the turn of the century literalized the fact that photography shares
a condition of painting by making photographs that imitated paintings. A later, more reflec-
tive, and self-critical turn in photography's dalliance with painting is taken in Thomas
Strath's photograph Louvre IV (1989), an image of the pervasive distraction of the
museum visitor. See my essay "The Museum Exposed," in Exhibited (Annandale-on-
Hudson, N.Y.: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 1994), the catalogue for an
exhibition organized by Vasif Kortun at the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum.

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