@manored,
That's pretty close to what I said. Phrasing it like this takes some dignity out of it and limits it a bit in scope though. The huge museums of the world were preceded in history by the "cabinet of rarities', being collections amassed by individuals according to their personal taste or views, no modern science being available to give these objects a "fixed" or "permanent" relationship. Now what makes a museum really dusty is that everything is submitted to some fixed relationships, in particular those of "established science", hall I: bivalva, hall II: gastropoda etc. The cabinet of rarities is always surprising, drawing attention towards the object itself and not to to some theory behind it, leaving room for many interpretations including the scientific, making the object visible instead of the theory. As I said before in this kind of collections an adult can feel like a child again: perceiving, feeling, thinking, wondering, dreaming... all together and all mixed. In the British Museum an adult would tend to read the explanation panels, but now he must make them up himself, and the imagination he has left helps abundantly. There's even some sheer poetry in those dead fish and I often make still lifes with them. And btw, let's be clear: a Van Gogh is not "apparantly useless stuff", it simply IS useless stuff, deriving its value not from its usefullness but from its significance. On the huge but clear difference between usefull things, significa and garbage, and on museum philosophy in general, see :
Collectioneurs, amateurs et curieux / Krzysztof Pomian. - Paris : Gallimard, 1987. - (Biblioth?que des Histoires)
And many other titles. As you see I take collecting pretty seriously ;-)
