In The Museum's Ruins

The museum has always had a special and controversial relationship with time and history. Avant-garde artists have derided it as a cemetery where art and culture go to die, and Theodor W. Adorno has drawn attention to the stale and deathly emanations of the adjective ‘museal’. ¹ By contrast, historians and curators have argued it is in the museum, removed from life’s vicissitudes, that works and artefacts live on to tell their stories of past civilizations as well as reflecting on our own. The museum’s vast collections are often ordered according to time’s arrow, roughly following a linear chronology. Yet, when described in such contrasting metaphors as charnel house of the arts, timeless pantheon of culture or history’s dusty storeroom, the museum itself seems exempt from our everyday notion of time. It promises an environment in which temporality is suspended, whether in death or eternal life, that runs counter to our own experience of life’s flux and constant change. As we shall see at various points throughout this chapter, the museum’s complex relationship with time is most thought-provokingly articulated in various forms of pictorial representation rather than in its concrete architectural manifestations.