Blog Task 2: Mining the Museum

Our second lecture was all about questioning museums. When you look at an exhibition in a museum, you are guided by the labels and information provided; the curator influences your point of view. Of course, a museum has an agenda or an ideology that it wants to portray. Is the museum about the institution? Does it decide and define our culture? The artifacts we see were never made for a gallery, they've been taken out of their original context. How can we trust that the museum is reflecting them in the correct way?

All these questions were to be asked during our blog task, in which I visited the V&A and looked specifically at one collection...

The Brief

The collection I focused on was in the British Gallery, entitled: Fashionable Living: Taking Tea 1710-1760.

I knew I wanted to look at a collection which focused on taxonomy, and after having a good look around, I settled on this particular collection as my focus. I chose it because I liked how it was solely dedicated to 'Taking Tea' and further more that this is classed as a 'fashionable' aspect of living - it just made me laugh. In modern day I see tea as something I'll make quickly, barely brewed and not very elegant; so it has come a long way since the mid 17th century.

Originating in China, the British adopted tea drinking to create a sense of culture, fashion and civilization. The British introduced  its own etiquette and it was considered impolite if you didn't follow it. This is somewhat ironic, since it is considered rude in Britain to slurp your tea, yet traditionally the Chinese slurp their tea to acquire a stronger more intense flavour. You could argue this exhibition is attempting to create a narrative of British culture, portraying it as civilized and sophisticated, however it also comes across as snobbish and superior, as though Britain is improving on the incivilities of Chinese culture.

Video: Taking Tea - V&A

Still today, taking tea is an aspect of 'fashionable living' for the middle classes. This exhibition appears to make a link of continuity with the past and the present - class was important then and continues to be now and the V&A strongly identify with this  - they claim that, "the V&A enriches people's lives". This suggests the institution utilises education to provide a sense of wealth or improvement for their visitors. However, the V&A's ideology of classism restricts their content mainly to the upper/middle classes and fails to represent everyone. The exhibition utilises historic facts about the middle and upper classes to paint a narrative of the wealthy in Britain at that time, yet it omits what the working class did. This makes the institution problematic. The aim of a museum is to educate, surely then, the content of exhibitions should remain impartial towards class and provide information about everyone.

(In case you were curious, the UK Tea Council paints a picture of how tea affected all classes on their website - 'A social history of the nation's favourite drink')

Overall, this exhibition utilises taxonomy to reflect both display and power. If mass were to represent wealth, the more tea pots displayed, the wealthier and more powerful Britain would come across. Nevertheless, this collection doesn't host an overwhelming amount, it's more about variety, detail, quality, individuality and ornateness. In this case, it is not mass which suggests power but variation. Ultimately, it's this idea of power and dominance which the V&A strives to portray, glorifying Britain as a wealthy, sophisticated and enriching nation.