Humanity and Rationality: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display
In 1789, the outbreak of the French Revolution created the conditions of the birth of public museums. From the date of birth of the museum, the spiritual enlightenment featuring the rational, the order, the nation-state, and the public education, and romanticism featuring art, literature, local folk customs had been accompanied by the historical development of the museum. From the constructionism perspective, social and cultural development of the museum had the isomorphism and the common experience of a series of changes of ideology and ideas—the governmentality of the public education, the anthropological concept of otherness, the representation of the edge culture (crowd), and “Poetics and politics” deconstruction and reflection. Therefore, as the museum “meta-narrative”, the spirit of the Enlightenment and Romanticism had the contradictory duality in the museum space to do constantly historic “performances” in a mean of “poetics and politics”, and of balance the museum’s own existence value of in different periods.