ABSTRACT
Oscar Wilde once observed, ‘the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people’ (1971: 684). Museums and exhibits are instruments of such invention. Through them, imaginary Japanese are invented along with imaginary cultural selves to accompany them. All reside cheek-to-jowl within universal survey art museums or the various museums of man [sic] created by that other invented entity, ‘the Western World’: imaginary Japanese, artificially constructed ‘American Art’, capriciously named ‘Renaissance painting’ and ‘Halls of Western Civilization’, that enshrine the customary, narrow use of ‘civilization’, for Western cultures (e.g., in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC).
