Critics and scholars have long debated the significance, charge, and scope of modern museums, variously considered as temples to the fine arts, monuments to science, repositories of history, showcases for political authority, social institutions marketing an image of cultural hegemony, instruments of nationalist propaganda, and, most broadly and pervasively, as a set of “disciplinary” practices engaged in controlling, classifying, and containing objects through explicit architectural means. Although the public institution as we understand it today emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, many museums had already been established by private individuals prior to the epistemological break ushered in by the French Revolution.

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