The politics of ‘the politics of display’: a nuclear-energy gallery, a science museum in the 1980s and a debate about patronage

This article examines a controversy over a nuclear-energy gallery at the Science Museum, London, in the early 1980s. It uses this case to explore the wider politicization of museums at this time, and thus the politicization of the display of science and technology. It argues that cultural changes in train since the 1960s, coupled with a museological turn towards ‘social history’ as the proper vehicle for exhibiting science and technology, led to the museum becoming newly subject to widespread critical scrutiny. That scrutiny had contradictory effects. On the one hand, it reinforced the image of the museum as a bastion of official culture and knowledge. On the other, it undermined this image, by exposing the ideological nature of the museum’s authority. This double movement laid the groundwork for the crisis of confidence that culminated in the ‘New Museology’ of the later part of the decade. Attending to this controversy thus suggests a need to revise prevailing scholarship on the ‘politics of display’, which often takes for granted an overly straightforward connection between museums and power.