Knowledge is property: Looking at exhibits and patents in 1851

Oxford Art Journal

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 53-60

  Purbrick, Louise ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61949162924     PISSN: 01426540     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/oxartj/20.2.53     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. Henry Cole, Fifty Years of Public Work, Vol. 2 (George Bell: London, 1884), p. 293.
2. The literature on museums is now extensive and various, although two strands associated with two publishing houses has emerged: Leicester University Press has established museum work within studies in material culture; Routledge has museum titles corresponding to its interest in cultural studies. Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects, Collections (Leicester University Press: Leicester, 1992)
3. and R. Lumley, The Museum Time-Machine (Routledge: London, 1988) are representative examples of each.
4. The book that helped establish 'new museology' as the label for all recent criticism, which has relativism as its common ground, was Peter Vergo (ed. ), The New Museology (Reaktion Press: London, 1989).
5. Organizing concepts of surveillance from Foucault has informed to a greater or lesser extent most recent work on museums. His disciplinary terminology (object, subject, vision, knowledge, and so on) has been completely assimilated. Two critics who have used Foucault's work explicitly and extensively, but differently, are Tony Bennett and Eilean Hooper-Greenhill. See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (Routledge: London, 1995)
6. and Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (Routledge: London, 1992).
7. The re-evaluation of education is not, of course, a new critical intervention. The focus of past criticism has been the ideological content of education rather than its part in a politics of epistemology. See, for example: Richard Johnson, 'Educating the Educators', in A. P. Donajgrodzki (ed. ), Social Control in Nineteenth-century Britain (Croom Helm: London, 1977);
8. Richard Johnson, 'Really Useful Knowledge' in John Clarke (ed. ), Working-Class Culture (Hutchinson: London, 1979).
9. Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, 'The Universal Survey Museum', Art History, vol. 3, no. 4, December 1980.
10. See also Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (Routledge: London and New York, 1995).
11. The extraordinary nature of exhibition space can be summed up with the anthropological term 'liminal'. Carol Duncan describes art museums as liminal, Civilizing Rituals, p. 11.
12. Cole, Fifty Years, pp. 242-3.
13. Molly Nesbitt in 'Ready-made Originals: the Duchamp model', October, 37, Summer 1986, comments upon patents and 'the world's fairs'. She notes: 'They proposed a grand new culture of the patent that quite overshadowed the culture of the copyright', p. 55.
14. 'Introduction' in the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Works of Industry of All Nations, Vol I (William Clowes: London, 1851), p. 7.
15. A long extract from Prince Albert's 1849 Mansion House speech is also quoted in the Official Catalogue, pp. 3-4.
16. Peter Le Neve Foster, 'Report from Mr Peter Le Neve Foster upon the working of the "Protection of Invention Act 1851"', Official Catalogue Vol 4, p. 110. The Act was extended for a time beyond the closing of the Great Exhibition. Protection for all inventors ended on 13 October 1852.
17. Le Neve Foster, Official Catalogue, p. 109.
18. The patent establishes a limited monopoly but its continued use was supported by free market advocates. For Jeremy Bentham, for example, the patent was a 'proper measure'. See W. Stark, Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings (George Allen: London, 1952), Vol. 1, pp. 260-5.
19. H. Harding, Patent Office Centenary. A Story of 100 Years in the Life and Work of the Patent Office (HMSO: London, 1953), p. 5.
20. The Committee for the Legislative Recognition of the Rights of Inventors was made up of members of the British Association. Harding lists all eleven patent law reform societies: committees of the British Association, the Society of Arts, the Lambeth Patent Law Reform Association, the Manchester Patent Laws Reform Association, the Birmingham Committee, the Society for Promoting Scientific Enquiries of Dublin, the Society for Promoting Amendment of the Law, the Committee for the Legislative Recognition of the Rights of Inventors, the Patent Law League, the National patent Law Amendment Society.
21. British Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee on the Law relative to the Patents for Invention, 1851 (Irish University Press, Inventions, General, Volume 1), p. 404. Hereafter, BPP.
22. BPP, p. 405.
23. For a discussion of the uses and meanings of labour as property by Chartists see: Gareth Stedman Jones, The Languages of Class (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1983), pp. 90-178
24. and the review by Robbie Gray, 'The Deconstructing of the English Working Class', Social History, vol. 11, 1986, pp. 363-73;
25. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press: New York, 1988), pp. 53-67.
26. I would suggest that the 1852 Patent Law Amendment Act was a Benthamite reform. It rationalized the patenting process producing liberal cheap government. For an alternative view of this see H. I. Dutton, The Patent System and Inventive Activity during the Industrial Revolution 1759-1852 (Manchester University Press: Manchester 1984), pp. 34-51 and p. 65.