This chapter explores ideas and arguments about the proliferation and circulation of photographic and digital reproductions of art. The existence of widely circulated reproductions before photography, and the early mingling of photography with painting and printmaking, demonstrates that the distinction between photographic reproduction and handmade original was always blurred. Even so, this distinction has informed thinking about art, reproduction, and museums. In the early twentieth century artists, curators, and art theorists thought that photography and photomechanical reproduction threatened the original work of art. The concepts of originality, aura, facture, and style became key, to distinguish photomechanical prints from valuable artworks, photography from painting. A new way of seeing seemed to be emerging – which treated reproduction as transparent, placed high value on originality and facture, and found new stylistic connections between images in the “museum without walls.” Modern forms of attention seemed to challenge the individualistic model of aesthetic contemplation enshrined in museums. Building on these early ideas, and situating them in relation to more recent discussion of digital and electronic media, this chapter argues that new practices of personal photography and image sharing require us to reimagine the museum with and without walls as potentially more “delirious,” playful, anarchic, and plural.
MR. POTTER'S MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIESwas a small Victorian museum that contained unique anthropomorphic tableaux made by the taxidermist Walter Potter (1835–1918). Its glass cases were crammed with small “stuffed” or “mounted” animals, such as birds, squirrels, rats, weasels, and rabbits, wearing miniature clothes and placed in models of the human settings of Potter's time. They play sports, get married, fill schoolrooms and clubs, but they also illustrate well known sayings, rhymes, and rural myths. From the 1860s the tableaux were displayed in Bramber, Sussex, in the southeast of England. In 1972 the Museum was sold and relocated to Brighton and two years later to Arundel, in Sussex. In 1985 it was sold again and moved to the Jamaica Inn – a Daphne du Maurier inspired tourist attraction on the edge of the bleak Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. The collection was finally dispersed in an auction sale in 2003. This sale attracted some media attention and several campaigns attempted to preserve the museum intact. The artist Damien Hirst claimed he had offered to buy the entire collection, but the auction went ahead (Hirst). Hirst was perhaps only the most high profile of those campaigning to keep Potter's collection together. Nevertheless, at the time it seemed hardly surprising that this unusual museum stood more chance of being rescued by an artist whose work often uses animal corpses to speak of mortality and the processes of preservation and decay, than it did of being bought by any public museum.
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