As an institutional man, perhaps I can add a little to this conversation from an institutional perspective. The origins of the museum as an institution are usually traced to the Enlightenment period and the age of exploration. This is not discounting the fact that collecting on an institutional scale was being done well before the modern period. China’s Emperors, for instance, were building collections of antiquities before antiquity had fairly ended and even before the Enlightenment, European courts, as well as the Roman Catholic Church, often accumulated objects and artefacts of various types for various purposes.
Two factors can be seen to coalesce in the enlightenment though which led to the foundation of the modern museum. What began as an efflorescence of curiosity about distant places which were virtually unknown and deeply misunderstood gradually evolved into the notion that “knowledge” could be attained from the accumulation of objects. When the early European explorers returned from their travels they brought with them curiosities, both natural and ethnological, which eventually found their way into what are referred today as cabinets of curiosities. While initially these rooms full of wonders and oddities (in the minds of Europeans who had never laid eyes on such things) were private, it wasn’t long before the entrepreneurial spirit took hold and various individuals started creating them in order to charge paid admission. These appear to have been rather successful and drew the interest of both the educated and ordinary laymen.
As modernist ideas took hold educational and state (and their parallel religious) institutions also began to form collections of objects, as well as the edifices in which to house them. Here the notion takes hold that collections could in fact be acquired in a scientific manner (basically accumulating one of each “thing” – it has been noted incidentally that in this sense, Noah was the first collector) and that these collections in turn could teach us something about humanity. This in turn led (perhaps inevitably) to the Linnaean and Darwinian influenced notion that artefacts could be classified from primitive to advanced. It also lead to the (fundamentally racist) Colonialist belief that technologically (and aesthetically, and spiritually) “advanced” societies had not only a right but an obligation to promote (by force when necessary – which was usually) the advancement of the so-called “primitive” peoples. As a result, collection, in the high-modernist sense, became an exercise in the accumulation of power (attendant to the collection of territory, and subject peoples) and museums, by extension, a demonstration of that power. The enlightenment also triggered a concomitant burst of creativity and exploration in notions of beauty and the value of art. Without going into detail, it should also be noted that the museum became an institution for the display of and appreciation for works of art. This development moved along largely (but not entirely) Eurocentric lines through the colonial era.
The collapse of colonialism and the post-modern critique has driven a fundamental re-evaluation of the importance and utility of the museum. This process continues today quite often in rancorous arguments which would be tedious to examine here in great detail. Suffice it to say that museums continue to be controversial and contested spaces. For practical reasons though, most museums continue to regard themselves as some combination of edifices of learning (about ourselves and others) and the exploration of the notion of beauty. These are admittedly problematic reasons for existence, however I would suggest that they are also institutional expressions of innate human needs to understand the world around us (both near and far) and to seek spiritual inspiration in beholding beauty (through beautiful objects). Museums also often consider themselves as (ideally, if not practically) guardians of the material objects – warehousing them for their preservation for future generations of humanity. This last aspect is probably the most controversial and divisive of the contested roles museums continue to play. It does however hint foundationally at an even more fundamental need of the human animal to accumulate objects.
Which brings me to your initial questions – 1, clearly knowledge enhances in some sense the collection of the object; it is however, I would argue, not primary to the object’s collection. I agree regarding question 2 that neither all, nor even most collectors actively pursue extraordinary knowledge about the objects which they collect (they may seek to know something about it but not in a systematic or profound manner). Rather, I would argue that, while knowledge enhances the value of the object (which is largely why institutions and serious collectors invest considerable effort into studying their collections), it is not essential to the object. Instead, I would suggest that there is a fundamental utility for acquiring and storing objects that is rooted in their materiality. This is both in the sense of the object's form, beauty, function, rarity, the value of its materials, magical power etc. and in the demonstration of the command of resources to acquire and preserve collections of objects (and present them to others). The object in this sense becomes a form of power, the collection of which expresses an innate human need to acquire, demonstrates our ability to do so, while satisfying a need to order and make sense of our material world. The accumulation of knowledge about that object enhances that power (adding value which may not otherwise be apparent) but is, I would suggest, not fundamental to it.
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