On the Social Production of Visual Difference

Abstract

A curator explores the process of construction of a major new Chemical Industry Gallery at London's Science Museum. The Museum is found to have acted as a broker bringing together diverse interests no one of which had an overwhelming significance. The paper follows the negotiations involved in selecting objects, text and physical environment and the translation of goals during the process. An exhibit is seen as a combination of mythic form and machine, and the paper concludes that the qualities of the machine exert an ever greater demand at the expense of the myth, during the course of construction.

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