Rewriting the museums' fictions: Taxonomies, stories and readers

1 May 1990

journal article
research article
Published by Taylor & Francis in Cultural Studies

Vol. 4 (2) , 176-191
https://doi.org/10.1080/09502389000490141

Abstract

The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe…. Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but (‘bric-a-brac’), a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original objects or metaphorically for their representations. (Donato 1979: 223)

Keywords

This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:

The Museum Time Machine
Published by Taylor & Francis ,2003
Refurbishing the east hall of the science museum, London
Museum Management and Curatorship, 1989
The Predicament of Culture
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Social Text, 1984