Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)

TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management

in the language of the American work ethic, "Yankee ingenuity", and the democratic aesthetic of a culture run by engines.

15 If museum exhibitions changed, these messages usually remained static. For perhaps three generations, from the early 1900s to the late 1960s, it could be said, in the words of Theodor Adorno, that "museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association". Museums, as he put it, were like family sepulchres,

16 and while he was referring to the art, the phrase was no less applicable to science. Worse, as science professed objectivity, so science museums testified to "the neutralisation of culture", their objects suited not only for a nation's attic, but also a "nation's scrapyard",

17 labels suggesting quaint reminders of forgotten days and primitive times. In our language, they were given a locality, but torn from their context, and deprived of their social significance. Their impact could scarcely be discerned from their museum presence. They were the world of the monumentálist and the necrophiliac, of Kafka and Proust, not of Braque or Baudelaire. 2. Present Discontents Suddenly, and within the last twenty years, much has altered. Some museums have changed themselves, while many more have had change thrust upon them. These changes have come about for several reasons. Increasingly critical curators are beginning to place man-made, as natural, as well as natural objects, in their habitat, yielding space to interpretation, and representing the "ecology of the machine" as no less relevant to its history than an animal is to its environment.

18 The re-location of technologies in human context - Stourbridge, St. Fagans, Skansken, Sovereign Hill - is restating their role in the "human condition". Admittedly, there are few successful attempts that show the work process, the assembly line, that exhibit conditions of labour, but the public seems to be asking for more of this, and what the public wants, it may well get.

19 For museums, as expensive institutions, have been called upon to justify themselves for the purse they use. Moreover, museums, long overtaken by the universities, and almost ignored as creative agencies by the educational establishment, saw themselves as being abandoned by the masses, propelled by leisure, seeking novelty. Accordingly, most metropolitan science museums have risen to their calling, by seeking new ways of both advancing scholarship and engaging visitors. Few museums willingly view themselves as mausolea. Most recognise that the simple, intentional message of positivist education is overshadowed by other messages, concerning consumption, and objects as decorative, utilitarian, emblems both of possession of wealth and the means of producing wealth.

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