In keeping with the taste of age?
Vortrag im Rahmen des Montagskolloquiums im Deutschen Museum
05.12.2011
Montag, 05.12.11, 16.00 Uhr: In keeping with the taste of age?
Display and the material culture of Georgian production and consumption in the Watt's workshop gallery
Vortrag von Dr. Helen Peavitt, London.
The decision to place James Watt's workshop on public display at the Science Museum, London, has led to the creation of a gallery space in which the artefacts of production and consumption are on display in very close proximity.
This paper explores the intertwined connections between designing, producing, selling and consuming goods in reference to the types of consumable and 'fashionable' goods on display in the gallery. This display presented the gallery content team with one particularly difficult interpretational paradox: mid-nineteenth century Britain venerated Watt and the steam engine for creating the conditions for tremendous prosperity and a consumer boom, when research of consumer objects for the gallery showed that many were made without the application of steam power, revealing production and consumption to be complicated processes.
(Aus der Vortragsankündigung)
Dr. Helen Peavitt ist Kuratorin am Science Museum, London.