Paper short abstract:

An examination of the history of sensory display and experience in the museum, contrasting the interactivity of early museums with the hands-off policies of the modern museum and exploring the social factors motivating this sensory shift.

Paper long abstract:

Traditionally the sense of sight is the only sense with a ticket to enter the museum. The other senses must be held in check, their encounter with artefacts kept to a prescribed minimum, if allowed at all. The same tendency exists in histories of museum artefacts in which objects are often wiped clean of the physical and emotional traces of the people who interacted with them.

This presentation counters this tendency by offering a history of artefacts with the fingerprints left on. Among the questions to be addressed are: Why did early museum goers insist on touching paintings? Why were people fascinated with the smell and taste of mummies? What did it feel like to be an exhibit? Why did museums lose their touch in the nineteenth century? Addressing these issues offers important new insights into both the allure of the rare and curious and the ways in which the museum became a key site for training the bodies of visitors in the sensory techniques of modernity.