August 2010

Donna Bilak’s review of Frances Larson’s An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World (Oxford UP, 2009) points to an interesting contradiction in Larson’s book — is it a biography of the collection or of the collector?

Larson’s explicit intent is to write “a biography of this gargantuan, amorphous, ethnographic collection”, but in practice , Bilak claims, the structure and content of the book puts Wellcome rather than his collection in the center.

Oxford University Press tries to solve the problem on the book’s website, when writing that “An Infinity of Things tells the story of the greatest private collection ever made, and the life of the man behind it”.

But can you have it both ways? Or do you, as Bilak, suggests, have to make a choice. Either the story of the collection or the story of the collector will have to frame the content and structure of the narrative.

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, has written an excellent overview of the online privacy problem, titled “The web means the end of forgetting”, in last week’s NYT (a reminder that old media often still publish the best stuff).

Despite Rosen’s focus on the legal aspects of our eternal exposure on the web, the most interesting aspect of the article is his discussion about the emergence of new social norms regulating our online presence. He has actually “been at dinners recently where someone has requested, in all seriousness, ‘Please don’t tweet this’”.

There is something important about changing social norms going on here. The few times I’ve taken photos of participants in academic meetings and seminar for this blog, I’ve felt somewhat guilty of breaching their right to privacy. But do Facebookers feel the same way?

Today, Ken Arnold is starting his temporary appointment as Visiting Professor in Medical Science Communication and Museology at Medical Museion.

When he is not visiting Medical Museion, Ken Arnold heads the Public Programmes team at the Wellcome Trust, where his role is to creatively direct Wellcome Collection — a very successful public venue in London that seeks to explore the connections between medicine, art and life. It has received very positive press attention throughout the world, attracted over 300,000 visits per year since 2007, and has been nominated for the Museum of the Year and European Museum of the Year awards.

The Wellcome Collection has emerged as the culmination of 15 years of innovative public work at the Trust, where Ken Arnold has run a variety of arts and exhibitions activities, including a gallery at the Science Museum devoted to exploring medicine in context. He also co-ordinated the establishment of the Wellcome Trust’s arts funding initiatives, which support collaborative work between scientists and artists. He was also Chief Curator of the highly successful exhibition Medicine Man: the Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome shown at the British Museum in 2003.

Ken Arnold gained a B.A. in Natural Sciences at Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in the history of science from Princeton University, and worked in a variety of museums (national and local) on both sides of the Atlantic, before joining the Wellcome Trust in 1992. He regularly writes and lectures on the culture of museums past and present and on the contemporary relations between the arts and sciences.

Some of his articles in collected volumes are highly original contributions to the problem of how to use art in the presentation of medical science. Other articles have raised the problems of the relation between history of medicine and medical museums in new and fruitful ways. In the monograph Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (2006), Arnold draws on the historical experiences of the classical 16^th and 17^th century curiosity cabinet as a resource for opening up a new field of discourse for contemporary museum innovation. The Collector’s Voice: Critical Readings in the Practice of Collecting (2000) raised new issues about the role of collecting in the history of museums. His academic activities also include supervision and examination of PhD-projects in science communication and museums studies at the University of Leicester, Leeds Metropolitan University, Oxford University and Open University.

We are very happy to get this opportunity for close encounters with Ken Arnold and thereby draw on his long experience in research-based exhibition making. If anyone wants to meet him during his Copenhagen sojourn, please contact him at k.arnold@wellcome.ac.uk.

(image credit: LabforCulture, www.labforculture.org)

Medical museums are often described as temples of horror. Invoking strong feelings of anxiety, fear and disgust, they remind their visitors of the frailty of life, disease and pain, bodily deformations, decay and death.

To make sense of such emotional responses we would need a better understanding of the aesthetics of anxiety, fear and disgust. Katrin Baumgarten at the Royal College of Art in London is one of the pioneers in this field. She is currently investigatng ‘revolting objects’ which exert

a certain ‘macabre attraction’ over the subject, leading to a peculiar absorption in the object and lending a magnetism to this aversion.

Like this electric switch which blurps out some yucky goo when you press it:

Baumgarten claims that the ‘power of disgust’ affects us in every aspect of our lives:

Disgust shocks, entertains and sears itself into memory.

By introducing the aesthetics of disgust as a tool for design, Baumgarten suggests,

one can intensify the user and object relationship through creating paradoxical emotions, going beyond practicality and functionality.

Sounds like a interesting topic for a medical museology phd project.

See also this news item in Wired.

Found this poignant message on a recycling container on Södermannagatan in Stockholm last week (the only rainy morning after weeks of drought):