Museums are, like everything else, products of history. They have all changed a great deal over time and can change again. They need to. Museums spring, essentially, from the Enlightenment. The British Museum was founded in 1753, a century-and-a-half after Galileo, but a hundred years before Darwin. The rapidly accumulating collections in the world’ s first public museums were a by-product of the birth of modern science, when researchers made discoveries by building collections—a devil’s toenail, for example, entered museums as an object of wonder only later to be re-labeled as the fossil of an extinct oyster.
In our post-Enlightenment age, the visible world has lost much of its mystery (which is perhaps why we care so little for it). Collecting is no longer a key method of research. Nor might so many people have visited museums in the past if they had been able to hop on a plane to see a kangaroo for themselves, or buy a book of color reproductions of Japanese prints, or watch, from the comfort of a couch, a computer simulation of a dinosaur sinking its teeth into its latest victim. Hence museum curators cannot go on running their museums as if the world hasn’t changed. Yet many operate as if the last eddies of the Enlightenment still lapped through their galleries and stores.