Overhead Samples
Almost nothing displayed in museums was made to be seen in them. Museums provide an experience that does not bear even the remotest resemblance to what their makers intended. This evident fact lies at the very heart of museum work.
Susan Vogel "Always True to the Object, in Our Fashion" Exhibiting Culture, p.191
To control a museum means precisely to control the representation of a community and some of its highest, most authoritative truths. It means also the power to define and rank people, to declare some as having a greater share than others in the community's common heritage -- in its very identity. Those who are in the greatest accord with the museum's version of what is beautiful and good may partake of this greater identity....In short, those who best understand how to use art in the museum environment are also those on whom the museum ritual confers this greater and better identity....
What we see and do not see in our most prestigious art museums....involves the much larger questions of who constitutes the community and who shall exercise the power to define its identity.
Carol Duncan, "Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship" Exhibiting Culture, p.101
Commenting on the ideology of masculinism:
"a point of view that privileges men's experiences, aspirations, and perspectives, not only imagining these to be most important but also believing them to be most representative of all. [It assumes] that the male gaze is objective, that men's ideals constitute the `truly human' that a "museum of man" is inclusive"
Barbara Clark Smith, "A Case Study of Applied Feminist Theories" In Gender Perspectives: Essays on Women in Museums, edited by Jane R. Glaser and Artemis A. Zenetou, pp.137-146 (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994)