{"id":6175,"date":"2014-12-05T07:42:38","date_gmt":"2014-12-05T07:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6175"},"modified":"2014-12-05T07:42:38","modified_gmt":"2014-12-05T07:42:38","slug":"object-fetishing-at-the-british-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2014\/12\/05\/object-fetishing-at-the-british-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"Object fetishing at the British Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I went to the British Museum's <a href=\"http:\/\/www.britishmuseum.org\/whats_on\/exhibitions\/germany_memories_of_a_nation.aspx\">Germany<\/a> through its\u00a0objects exhibition the other day, and came away underwhelmed. \u00a0This was for a number of reasons.<\/p>\n<p>Firstly, I was disappointed at how brief it was, and concluded that I was expected to go on to buy the book of the exhibition \u2013 another \u00a330 \u2013 to overcome this limitation. \u00a0I demured.<\/p>\n<p>Then there was the question of the space devoted to science and maths. \u00a0Oddly, there wasn't any. \u00a0Given what Germans contributed to these fields in the 19th and early 20th centuries, this seems a curious omission. \u00a0Perhaps it's all in the book of the exhibition, I thought, but it wasn't \u2013 and when Thomas Cromwell gets a mention in the index, but Werner Heisenberg doesn't, it look like a curator blind spot. \u00a0Of course, you might think, this is all about objects, and how do you show what Heisenberg (and Boltzmann, Hertz, Haan, Meitner, Born, et al.) did in an object? \u00a0Well, science museums manage this, you might counter.<\/p>\n<p>The real problem was different, however, and more serious. \u00a0It was the lack of any coherent underpinning narrative. \u00a0What was it about the Germans and Germany that we were supposed to see through all these objects? \u00a0I came away none the wiser. \u00a0It just seemed a collection. \u00a0How fortunate then that I'm reading <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.co.uk\/books\/about\/The_German_Genius.html?id=3z9NfMRRVrEC&amp;redir_esc=y\">German Genius<\/a> by Peter Watson, as there are narratives galore running through this.<\/p>\n<p>I'd say don't bother with Museum's\u00a0object fetishing, read this book instead; you might just understand yourself a little bit more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I went to the British Museum's Germany through its\u00a0objects exhibition the other day, and came away underwhelmed. \u00a0This was for a number of reasons. Firstly, I was disappointed at how brief it was, and concluded that I was expected to...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}