ABSTRACT
In his celebrated essay “Valéry Proust Museum,” Theodor Adorno speaks of the way the modern museum can function as “a metaphor… for the anarchical production of commodities in fully developed bourgeois society.” In the time since Adorno wrote, the metaphor has become a discourse, a pervasive critique of the museum and its practices. Adorno begins with a concise formulation of two of the crucial elements in this critique. First, museums deprive objects of the life proper to them: for Adorno, “museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art. They testify to the neutralization of culture.” Second, museums, in their pervasiveness and inevitability, monopolize certain fields of vision, and thus constitute a strategy of power linked to hegemonic capitalism: “Anyone who does not have his own collection (and the great private collections are becoming rare) can, for the most part, become familiar with painting and sculpture only in museums.”1 Though this critique could in theory encompass all types of museums, Adorno speaks only of art museums, for art museums constitute the most elaborately articulated instance of decontextualization as a strategy of power. Of the various museum types, art museums have traditionally been the most wedded to a system of display that privileges the object and, disregarding evidence to the contrary, takes visual perception to be universal.2 They have also ostentatiously cultivated their association with hegemonic culture, or, as John Berger puts it, “The majority take it as axiomatic that museums are full of holy relics which refer to a mystery that excludes them: the mystery of unaccountable wealth.”3
