Blinking brains, corporate spectacle, and the Atom Man

In 2011, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the Netherlands presented the Beauty in Science (Schoonheid in de Wetenschap) exhibition, a show that aimed to foster interest in the natural sciences among the general public. It did so not by focusing on the economic or social effects of scientific research, but by emphasizing the “pleasing” aesthetic experience of looking at scientific images. Impressive pictures of cells, fungi, fetuses, and stars were framed as wonderful (by-)products of scientific missions, and as attractive signboards for an important quest to “make the invisible visible.”[2] Staged within the walls of the white cube, over seven hundred scientific images thus became purged from their individual histories of production and argumentation, and arranged to foreground the formal qualities of the visualizations, some of which could be viewed from lounge chairs, supplemented with ambient sound. The framework of the art museum was understood as the perfect context for the intended discursive emphasis on formal aesthetics. As such, Beauty in Science reminds us that, still today, art museums have not ceased to play a role in the presentation of a particular “image of science” to large audiences, and that the discursive space of the art museum offers opportunities for constructing, subverting, advertising, and obscuring narratives of science. While the exhibiting of images of science within the walls of art museums has a long history, this article turns to one particular historical exhibit in the Stedelijk Museum to offer insights in the way such presentations are embedded within historically situated ideas about the public understanding of science, exhibition strategies, and the role of art vis-à-vis science.