Thing Theory goes public. ===== Unlike museum pieces of critical beauty or quantifiable value, “objects” — as distinct from objets d’art — can be anything that can be touched or felt. Fashioning a meaningful narrative from them means more than randomly rummaging through memorabilia and heirlooms from a metaphorical attic. They must also encompass the broad spectrum of human experience. As Dr. Jeremy D. Hill, the British Museum’s research manager, said, “There’s a limit to the number of stone axes or Buddhas one can include.” Fortunately, as Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet, once observed, “You can find the entire cosmos in the least remarkable objects.” Indeed, entire books have been devoted to the dominion of the pencil (Henry Petroski inflated it to “a study of engineering” and revealed why it was typically yellow), the zipper (named by B. F. Goodrich in the 1920s for the rubber boots that bore the new fastener), the toilet and the potato. That reach demonstrates, as Bill Brown, professor of American culture at the University of Chicago, has written, that “history can unabashedly begin with things.”
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 03:03:19 +0000