good people themselves, who, through this, are only able to bear their own ugliness, an
ugliness that is effectively an answer to an unhealthy need for cleanliness, for a bilious
small-mindedness and for boredom. The curse (which terrifies only those who utter it)
leads them to vegetate as far as possible from the slaughterhouses. They exile themselves,
by way of antidote, in an amorphous world, where there is no longer anything terrible,
and where, enduring the ineradicable obsession with ignominy, they are reduced to eating
cheese.
NOTE
1W.B.Seabrook, The Magic Island, London: Marlowe & Co., 1989.MUSEUM
According to the Grande Encyclopédie, the first museum in the modern sense of the word
(that is, the first public collection) would have been founded in France by the
Convention, on 27 July 1793. The origin of the modern museum would thus be linked to
the development of the guillotine. However, Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, belonging to
the University, and founded at the end of the seventeenth century, was already a public
collection.
Museums have clearly developed beyond even the most optimistic hopes of the
founders. It is not just that the museums of the world, as a whole, today represent a
colossal accumulation of riches, but that all those who visit the museums of the world
represent without doubt the most grandiose spectacle of a humanity freed from material
concerns, and devoted to contemplation.
It should be taken into account that the rooms and art objects form only the container,
the content of which is formed by the visitors. It is this content that distinguishes a
museum from a private collection. A museum is like the lungs of a city—every Sunday
the crowds flow through the museum like blood, coming out purified and fresh. The
paintings are only dead surfaces, and the play, the flashes, the streams of light described
by authorized critics occur within the crowd. On Sunday, at five o clock, at the exit of the
Louvre, it is interesting to admire the stream of visitors, who are visibly animated by the
desire to be totally like the heavenly apparition with which their eyes are still enraptured.
Grandville has schematized the container’s connections with the content in museums,
through an exaggeration (superficially at least) of the links formed provisionally between
visitors and visited. Similarly, when a native of the Ivory Coast places some polished
stone axes from the neolithic period into a receptacle full of water, bathes in the
receptacle, and offers fowl to what he believes to be ‘thunderstones’ (fallen from the sky
in a crack of thunder), he merely prefigures the attitude of enthusiasm and of profound
communion with the objects that characterizes the visitor of the modern museum.
The museum is the colossal mirror in which man finally contemplates himself in every
aspect, finds himself literally admirable, and abandons himself to the ecstasy expressed in
all the art reviews.
Georges Bataille 21