ABSTRACT
In June 2016, a good way in to the redevelopment, the Science Museum announced that Wonderlab would be branded ‘the Statoil Gallery’ in recognition of one of its funders and that it would be placed behind a paywall as a route to a more sustainable funding model and in order to enable more free school visits. Any attempt to understand how space and society are intertwined and why the people see the physical traces and feel the outcomes of the economisation of cultural work in our experiences, must start from Henri Lefebvre and his investigation of the production of space. Advanced capital creates certain kinds of spatial and social forms and erases others and understanding how and why this happens is crucial to understanding the economisation of museums. As 'countervailing institutions' of capitalist society, public museums and galleries are, as Marquand noted of public space more generally, gifts of a very recent history.
