The Shoebox Museum: The Aesthetics and Organizational Concepts of Children
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Abstract
Guests at the Smithsonian, the Louvre, or the Met go to see pieces that have been declared important and valuable repositories of meaning, beauty and culture by trustworthy authorities. Elegantly presented as final, finished objects for cultural consumption, exhibits in glass cases and behind velvet ropes are validated by hushed, reverent, paying audiences. Traditional museums simultaneously recognize importance and create it, through the frame of the museum itself. However, the notion that a particular space can confer significance upon objects, marking and raising them from their quotidian context, is not unique to adults or to fully accredited cultural authorities. If the museum is reserved for fixed, established, mature “high cultural” objects, how then does that often invisible, incompletely cultured class of individuals, children, recognize/create objects that are beautiful and meaningful to them? This paper considers children as intuitive curators, whose ready grasp of collection and containment as processes of sacralization both upsets and reinscribes the values of traditional museums: authority, publicity, permanence and presentation.
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