ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part describes the Western tradition of artistic invention in terms of the rhetorical arts of memory as the predecessor to modern ideas of creativity and imagination. It presents new documentation of Europeans’ belittling attitudes towards the Middle East established in the mid-nineteenth century. The part introduces what might be called the performative implications of the nineteenth-century forms of popular education and entertainment. It is concerned with the ways in which the material evidence itself was ordered at the institutional level. The most convincing critiques to date portray the museum as if it were always, in essence, more than an actual physical presence, a place or an institution housing a collection. The epistemological status of the illusion that museums create using objects that were initially made for other purposes, is a matter for careful consideration.
