ABSTRACT
This is the story of a glass half full: of culture as the rallying call of the nineteenth-century, and the production of culture – of cultured individuals and cultural artifacts – as the period’s pervasive ambition. It is also the story of a glass half empty – of the desire to preserve and protect this nascent and self-conscious cultural production, to archive and assert its place in history. The protagonist of this story is the glass itself – a transparent vessel, a hermetic enclosure, and the ersatz embodiment of the almost desperate need to produce culture while simultaneously displaying and preserving it. As protagonist, the glass operates both literally and metaphorically: as a bell jar, a hothouse, a jardin d’hiver on the one hand, and as a symbol of transparency, display, and self-evidence on the other. As tropes, bell jars and hothouses stand for those dimensions of culture whose primary aspiration is preservation. Both the hot house and the bell jar connote climatological constancy, radical de-contextualisation of the objects housed within them, exposed interiority, and spectacular display; and tacitly this constancy, de-contextualisation, exposure and display are ultimately in the service of preservation.
