Designing the Morality of Consumption: 'Chamber of Horrors' at the Museum of Ornamental Art, 1852-53

摘要

Design means order, method, and plan: the antonym of disorder. And a museum was, and remains today, epistemologically a space in which the world is ordered in a certain system. Considering the significance of principles for pacifying society as expressed in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869), anything associated with disorder was in a way a "horror" to the Victorian mind. Adding nuances of morality to taste and design helped to manipulate and regulate public opinion and standardize taste, especially when this was visualized at a national museum. In 1959, Kenneth Clark, then Director of the National Gallery, published a pamphlet entitled, What Is Good Taste? In the pamphlet, written in the transitional period from modern to post-modern, he did not give a definitive answer to the question, but he made an interesting comment: I'm not saying that machinery is the enemy of taste neces- sarily; but it changes the basis of taste from making to choosing. In a society of mass production supported by mechanization, what mattered for taste was not making or production, but choosing or consumption. Thus, society was led toward a more consumption-conscious axis. The "Chamber of Horrors" symbolized the new conditions for taste, and forced the change on Victorian society. A new consciousness was rooted into the consumer.