Rewriting the museums' fictions: Taxonomies, stories and readers

Abstract

The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe…. Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but (‘bric-a-brac’), a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original objects or metaphorically for their representations. (Donato 1979: 223)