Introduction. “Museums as Storytellers: Reinventing the Art of Showing and Telling”

In The System of Objects (1968), Jean Baudrillard argues that the serial organization of objects in a collection creates an ambiguous space where “functionality is forever collapsing into subjectivity” and “the everyday prose of objects is transformed into poetry, into a triumphant unconscious discourse” (86; 87). Museums, and before them cabinets of curiosities and private collections, have always functioned as spaces for the invention and visual staging of discourse: the history of their o...