Museums, Modernity and the Class Politics of Touching Objects

Abstract

The fact remains that museums gradually became spaces in which visual experience was apparently prioritized over tactility. In maintaining that touch did contribute to museum visitors knowledge, imaginative experience and subjectivity Classen and Howes implicitly challenge Foucault and Preziosi's view that touch had no intellectual role in museums during the eighteenth century. A closer analysis reveals that the upper classes always had licence to touch and their touch was deemed rational and non-damaging. In the 1930s, Adrian Stokes developed John Ruskin's notions of the artist's expressive touch to suggest that that touch constituted a means of appreciating and understanding art work. In doing so they have tended to specify vision as the dominant sensory mode of modernity and to relegate the other senses, particularly touch, to a less sophisticated past. Equally importantly, touching objects in collections was not considered to be a universally valid activity.

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