ABSTRACT
In the natural sciences, the museum demonstrated the possibility of knowing the world ethically. It was this that gave this institution the status of being a truth institution. Other disciplines had variable success in emulating the natural sciences and some like art history, while they embraced the same principles, were incapable of establishing the same ethical relationship to their subject matter. This chapter discusses and problematises these engagements using the concepts of bordering. It goes on to consider the implications of expertise, and how this repositioned the museum in society, and transferred the focus and legitimacy of knowledge into a structure of institutions and careers that demanded citizens’ obedience. The curator becomes a border guard; the museum a border post. With this development, the principles of knowledge-making adopted many of the idols Francis Bacon had sought to expel. While the museum would continue to claim virtue, it would find itself compromised by institutionalism and transformed from a progressive institution on the edge of knowledge into a site of conservatism.
