ABSTRACT
One finds few working painters or sculptors in the back rooms of an art museum, busily supplying the galleries with new works. There are no physicists in the basements of science centres generating new laws of the universe for public exhibition. These scenarios sound absurd because we have long taken it for granted that museums exhibit objects or bodies of knowledge that have been produced at other times and sites in the intellectual economy of our culture. Whatever interpretive work the museum does to give the object or knowledge meaning, if it is recognized at all, is of a different sort than that involved in its production. Public representation relies on technical research only for factual authority; the actual process of creating public exhibitions bears no resemblance to the process of generating the knowledge they portray.
