" Rightly viewed no meanest

object is insignificant"

Thomas Carlyle

Popular Culture in the Museum

or

one must imagine everyday life

In an essay from the series" Things andNon- things", the communications scholar andphilosopher Vilém Flusser distinguished between twostates of being for bottles: those which are a part ofculture, and those which are waste. He assigned oneexistence to remembering and the other to forgetting,but both bottles had liminal qualities: those belongingin the museum and those which were superfluous." Because cultural studies tend not only to recall a partof what has been forgotten, but also to bury anotherpart even more deeply", they help make history anddetermine what is worthy of being preserved. Thestarting point for every museum collection is thereforeempty bottles produced to be emptied and to end aswaste. The path followed by a bottle on its way into themuseum can thus be regarded as an expression of" thehuman ability which really deserves to be called human;the ability to become detached from things and to regardthem from completely original points of view."

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The significance of artefacts is constantlychanging. The museum of cultural studies, as a placewhere they are interpreted, contributes to this anddetermines how things appear, what they representand what information they convey. Therefore museumpresentations cannot remain constant but from timeto time must subject idea, content and appearance tofundamental revision. During such reorganization phasesquestions naturally emerge which both relate to the basicpossibilities of museum work and are directed at the

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