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Once, art museums were picture galleries, special symbolic realms. One looked elsewhere for artefacts of everyday use, in the cool objective light of natural history museums or in social history museums and heritage houses. Yet while museums classify objects, they are not themselves the products of a comprehensive, rational classification system but of contingent historical processes, with all the idiosyncrasy this entails. One may have museums for anything or for nothing, as the wacky plausibility of the myriad museums dreamed up by Murray Bail in his novel Homesickness demonstrates. l
In the stupendous plethora of contemporary museums there are fascinating lacunae. No traditional museum type is the "natural" habitat of craft objects from Western cultures, yet increasingly textiles, jewelry, tools, furniture, toys and domestic objects find themselves nesting more often and more or less comfortably in a variety of museums: art museums, historic houses, regional collections and so on. These "cuckoos" are often in places and combinations which provoke productive intersections of museum types and objects, and propose new problems for traditional museum practice, spaces and audiences. This holds true whether the objects hail from the clearly distinguishable spheres of high decorative arts, the crafts or are simply objects from everyday use: all object-types participate in this grand dance of conceptual relocation. 2
Historically, museums were established to deal with objects classified and collected by certain intellectual disciplines – for instance, natural history museums share their scientific basis with anthropology. Thus it is clear that contemporary interest in ethnic cultures and domestic objects, to take only two recent developments, suits the purposes and character of some museums sometimes, but not others, and never all. This process of exploration, uneven, inconsistent... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline