ABSTRACT
While Discursive Settings gave an account of sculpture research, the following part consists of elaborations on displays of sculptures in museums. Our focus is primarily on contemporary, permanent museum exhibitions of ancient sculptures. Like large public institutions in general, museums also tend to change slowly in small unnoticeable steps. Although exhibits to some degree mirror, and are embedded in, contemporary discourses and concerns, they are also constrained by conceptual assumptions and institutional practices. The slow pace of change facilitates an analysis of displays as vestiges of earlier, perhaps even obsolete, ideologies, discourses and conceptual schemes. Indeed, some museums are explicitly aimed at preserving a setting as it once was at a given point in time. The taxonomic order in some displays may appear unintelligible to us today. The sense of an exhibit as a chaotic heap of things without any apparent order can often be explained by positioning a discursive divide between us (today’s visitors) and the settings that once shaped the formation of the display. On the other hand, a sense of recognition and familiarity with an arrangement is an indication that we share the discursive assumptions that shaped the exhibition.
