The display of an object as a museum document does not emerge out of an objective truth; while attributes like scarcity, age, uniqueness, and the capacity to index a culture do play a role, its display is ultimately a gesture of selection with social, political, and cultural implications.
The cases we can discuss here to highlight this point are many but let us see how a natural object, such as a moon rock, becomes a valuable museum object (Pearce, 1994). For anyone apart from those with expert geological knowledge, a rock taken from the moon would appear as an ordinary rock that would probably arouse little or no interest. That is, if seen in an environment where there are no narratives about it, anyone could mistake it for an earth rock, which most probably would entail indiference. Its materiality, in other words, would be insignificant. Once a moon rock is selected on the basis of its physical properties by an expert institution to be a museum piece, however, its very materiality transforms in front of our eyes. From the ordinary object it once was, it changes, almost magically, into something precious, upon which all sorts of political, social, and cultural investments can be projected. Politicians can describe it as a national treasure, museum audiences can take selfies in front of it, people can discuss it over dinner with friends, argue about its origins, implicate it in conspiracy theories, and so on. The same materiality is suddenly animated by expert knowledge, which elevates it from mere stuf to an object indexing the moon. Referring to a moon rock displayed in the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C., the cultural theorist Susan M. Pearce says that
the moon rock is an actual piece of the moon retrieved by the Apollo17 mission. There is nothing particularly appealing about the rock; it is a rather standard piece of volcanic basalt some 4 million years old. Yet, unlike many other old rocks, this one comes displayed in an altar-like structure, set in glass, and is complete with full-time guard and an ultrasensitive monitoring device.
(Meltzer, 1981 in Pearce, 1994:10)
It is “through its selection and display” that the moon rock has “become a part of the world of human values, a part which, evidently, every visitor wants to bring within his own personal value system” (Pearce, 1994: 10). What then “distinguishes the ‘discrete lumps’ from the rest”, Pearce continues, “is the cultural value it is given”, as “the crucial idea is that of selection, and it is the act of selection which turns a part of the natural world into an object and a museum piece” (Pearce, 1994:10, emphasis added). Framing the rock’s materiality in expert language turns this otherwise tedious object into an exceptional piece that stands apart from the rest in an altar, it individualizes and artifies it. The materiality of the rock—its surface, chemical composition, shape, and so on—can provide possibilities and limitations for its interpretation and framing, but ultimately it is the expert discourse that inserts it into the world of human values (see Figure 2.1).
The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating
35