Damien Hirst, "Exquisite Pain" (2008) Wallace Collection
Starting this month the BBC & the British Museum are beginning a radio series called “A History of the World” using 100 objects in the Museum’s collections to explain history through everyday objecs, trinkets and even works of art. What will future archaeologists find of our present to explain their past? When they recover pieces like the Hirst statue to the left showing a flayed St. Bartholomew in an adlocutio (about to speak) pose, what will this say to them about 21st c. society? Makes one think. Hopefully they will take the words of Simon Schama, in today’s Financial Times, to heart:
The answers we get from objects, then, depend crucially on the questions put to them. The danger is using them instrumentally, as validations of prior notions – derived from other sources – of what this or that period might have been like. Arriving at such a likeness of a time, the Germans called this Zeitgeistgeschichte – the revelation of the underlying spirit of the age. The historian-through-objects needs to be on guard against simply fitting found objects on to that template and then hailing them as evidence of its particular character.
For more on the BBC/British Museum project click here. For the rest of Schama’s piece click here.
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