Thus the value of the work was defered to its price, and the value of the price became one of valorization of the museum that purchased the work as well as the enlivening of a market in art and museums. In this context it becomes ironic to think of art as something other than a commodity, and of a museum as something other than a medallion of pride. Traditionally, it is the gallery system, which honestly plays the game of the art market; the museum dissembles its economic presence behind a rhetoric of material transcendence, claiming a kind of transportation of the individual into a realm of thought through and beyond the materiality of the artwork. Here is the question for Turkey 's nascent museums: should the museum play such a spiritual role in our commercializing culture? Should it provide a psychological alternative for the meaning of art, one beyond price? If not, what does a museum mean differently than a gallery? If so, how is it to do this if we cannot speak of value beyond price? How can the museum frame a public, which can use art to conceive of the value of art beyond the value of its money? How can the museum construct a ritual, which produces art as something transcendent different from that produced by the galleries to which Turkey has become accustomed?

The son of a high-level state minister who had been captured as a boy from a Greek village, adopted by the head of the Navy, and sent to France as one of the first Ottoman subjects to receive a Western education, Osman Hamdi grew up within Ottoman high society speaking French as well as Ottoman Turkish as a native. Although initially trained in law in France , he abandoned his studies to train in painting with Gerome, best known and well-respected for his Classicist and Orientalist genre paintings. Initially stationed in Baghdad , in 1873 Osman Hamdi administered the Ottoman contribution to the World Exposition in Vienna , producing two photographic compendia on architecture and on costume, which could define the wealth and breadth of cultures within the Ottoman territorial sphere. But in an age of increasing nationalism, it was precisely the plenitude of these cultures and heritages, which would soon serve as a double-edged sword against the empire. Upon his return to Istanbul , Osman Hamdi first served in the council of the 6 th municipality of Istanbul , that of Pera. Within the next ten years, he would become the first Ottoman director of the Imperial Museum (today's Istanbul Archaeology Museum ); the founder of the Sanaye-i Nefise Mektebi, modeled on the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris ; the empire's first archaeologist; author of the country's first archaeology legislation, which would be revised in 1884 and again in 1906. All the while, Osman Hamdi eschewed all but the most pragmatic of writing, investing his creativity in the paintings which remained a part of his private, not his public, world. For the Imperial Museum made a conscious decision to exclude the contemporary world from its walls - despite the inclusion of Islamic Arts which opened the museum to multiple categories and despite the contemporary growth in the number of Western-style Ottoman painters. In making this decision, the museum, whose current building was built in 1881, set the stage for museums related to art that would always remain external to its contemporary production, and thus also to the interface between art and the public in contemporary society. While in my book I deal at length with the issues at stake in the production of Ottoman museums, here I want to take up the issue of museums not as they started, but as they have ended up today in Turkey: all too often as a desire rather than a place, yet a desire that is oddly selfless in that the desire more for an abstract need than for a personal one.

Why, then, begin here, with this odd painting, which becomes all the more odd the longer we inspect it? ( Tortoise Trainer ) Here is Osman Hamdi, in real life a very Western Ottoman gentleman, transformed into an anachronistically Ottoman character, complete with a colorful robe and turban that might also decorate an Orientalist fantasy, such as one produced by his teacher Gerome . Yet unlike in the Westerner's timeless fantasy of the East, this anachronistic vision witnesses neither a violent nor a lazy nor a sensual Easterner, but one engaged in the sublime art of instruction. Ironically, this art is one step removed from that of Osman Hamdi: a painter, he speaks of teaching through a flute, translating the gaze into the ear. With a symbolic flute with which to call to his students and a switch with which to reprimand them, he stands in an ideally serene space of contemplation - a mosque, but a part of the mosque that is not directly designated for religious devotion, a part one might even suggest could be secular. Thus he sets the stage of his museum: a secular temple of learning, where the senses collide into a mode of thought. Yet his students are tortoises, with neither ears to hear his flute nor soft flesh to heed his switch. His ministrations are futile. What is the museum to do if its audience is tortoises? Or, put more politely, and I might say more accurately, what is a museum in the absence of a very selfish desire for its presence of the sort that a tortoise most obviously does not have. but which also is not present in most human beings?

Let us think first, then, not of the museum, but o f the desire. One never desires something that is present; desire is predicated on a lack, and what is worse, the moment this lack is filled, the desire moves elsewhere. We are insatiable tortoises. But what is it that we desire through the museum? Why are there so many new museums incipient on Istanbul 's horizon? Is the desire for art, to make up for its current lack? But there is art, and there are galleries. What more is a museum to do? What desire lies behind this newfound need? To create a place where art can go once it is made, to replace its slow demise in storage? To provide a prospect for the makers of art to situate their work? To make art enter society, where it has until now remained private? To make art enter history through its presence in public space? Or is the desire not precisely one of art, but one of space - to create a space to go to witness art and to witness each other witnessing art; in short, to give something to share under the sheltering roof of the museum, when such sharing has been closed off in the world outside? Are these museums about art, or about people, or about desire?

In order to understand the nature of this desire, one first must understand what a museum is and does, not simply in its physicality but also as an institution within the social sphere. Most simply viewed, a museum can be thought of as a building, segregated from everyday life by an entryway. Let us pause for a moment at the entryway - it is raised from the street, separated from the traffic. The interior of the building promises silence, or if it contains noise, it promises a noise divested from the everyday. It is not the speech of the cars or the television or your family and friends here. In the nineteenth century, it promised this great divide from the worldly world through the façade of a Greek temple, reminiscent of the Renaissance idealization of the Classical world; today, the museum is usually still a step away from the everyday world, and a grand atrium inside suggests the volume of a cathedral in which silence and thought will echo. Instead of hearkening to Classicism via the Renaissance, it hearkens to the rationalism and secularism of modernism. The use of the temple façade reminds us that the building that inspired the modern use of the word museum was itself a temple to the Greek muses; it did not include any objects to be viewed, but instead inspired contemplation of inspiration itself. But the modern world, based as it is on a specular economy, relied on an intermediary - art - for the comprehension of inspiration. The entryway designates the museum as both public - most people can enter it - and as private - in that its entry is governed by rules such as codes of dress and behaviour, entry fees, and hours of admission. The museum entryway is a space of passage from the mundane to the inspired, and the ticket booth is like a filter where grubby money is sacrificed as an offering to the inspirational gods within.

Once inside, the mus eum building consists of spaces that are both public (galleries) - that can be explored with relative freedom - and that are private - which are restricted to those who work in the museum. (museum exhibits/backstage) Traditionally, museums have hidden their private functions such that the casual visitor remains unaware of the staging involved in a museum - they are to think only of the exhibits and the works, not of directors, curators, restorers, purchases, loans, and storage. Thus the museum creates a window (and we might think of this window as the display case itself) which hides the operations of its own making, producing art as pure and timeless and putting it in a story that the visitor walks through, never aware that the story had an author and a history and could indeed have been other than the way it is.

In this mediation between the public and the private sphere, the museum belongs to a category of modern public institutions - including schools, prisons, and temples - which mediate between knowledge and behaviour. Like these institutions, one learns to know how far into the institution one can enter; one learns the rules that govern when and how and why one might enter, and how deeply one might penetrate. Just as a student knows that, having registered and paid entry fees, she can access classrooms but cannot access offices, a visitor attends the museum in the comfort of knowing that she is not responsible for the exhibits, only, like a student in the classroom, for taking them in. Or is this discomfort? There comes a point where the student wonders what is behind closed doors. And then comes graduation, and most students never find out and forget that they ever may have wondered. What about the museum, from which the visitor never graduates? There may come a time when the opacity of the story becomes a little too neat, too predictable, too complete. To this questioner, the museum offers its own objects as escape valves; whereas I might offer a museum willing also to offer itself - willing to present its own innards - storage spaces, conservational decisitions, and curatorial plans. Rather than simply reading a preformed story and taking in its ideology, a visitor would instead become conscious of the ideology behind the objects. Instead of experiencing a monetary desire for the object that can be seen but cannot be touched or taken home (like looking longingly into the window of a very expensive jeweler), the visitor would instead take pleasure in thinking the space between the objects, experiencing a desire not for the object but for the muse.

What about these objects? Museums contain objects of some sort or another. These o bjects, through their presence in the museum, come to have a value independent from that within the everyday world, a value which is mediated by the museum itself. That is, the objects in a museum are valuable, but their value is not simply an a priori value within the everyday world, but a value that is created through their presence (or the presence of similar objects) in a museum. In contrast to libraries , which tend to create a complete archive of texts (sometimes within the boundaries of a category) for selective use by the user, museums produce the value of the objects by selecting them from among other objects in the everyday world that are not selected. For example, a library of jewelry would to collect all specimens of jewelry, or maybe all written works about jewelry, and these gain the attention of the user of the library - thus gain value - through the individual interest of the user. The desire of a library is mediated by the individual who selects what she reads; the desire of the museum is mediated by the curators, who create a reading list for the viewers. In contrast to this imaginary library, a museum of jewelry would not attempt to collect all jewelry. Rather, it would select certain works according sets of criteria that vary, both between museums and within a particular institution. The jewelry museum might choose jewelry that is particularly unique, perhaps because of its history or the place it was made; or jewelry that was made by somebody famous, or worn by somebody famous, made even more famous by the choice of her jewelry for the museum; or jewelry that is not unique but particularly typical of a particular era or place. In all these cases, the way in which the jewelry is understood is determined before the visitor ever appears. Whereas the library includes a set of texts, the museum itself writes a text.

It writes this text through crea ting an order, a sentence composed of works in the exhibit. Regardless of the criteria of selection, the museum must take on a second process of selection in arranging the works at hand. For unlike the library, in which works are ordered in a rationalized logic external to curatorial desire, then subsequently selected through the will of the user, in the museum works are laid out along a path along which the viewer must walk. The order of the works then comes to tell a story, laid bare by the text - titles and labels, guidebooks and tourguides - that often accompanies it. One might, then, think of a visit to a museum as a walk through a cartoon or a fotoroman, in which each object is posed as a single frame of action, exemplifying a particular moment of meaning in the overall story. Or, alternatively, the mere selection of objects and their placement side by side will encourage the visitor to construct a story that links them.

For example, at the Topkapi Palace Museum , the visitor enters the costume exhibit , a rectangular room, towards the right and tours the room in a counter clockwise manner. Although the labels on the clothing only provide the names of the owners of the clothing and the dates it was used, the order of the costumes, ending with those of the late Ottoman era, encourage the visitor to read a process of modernization. Ironically, even though this process is most obviously characterized by a blatent rupture at the time of the Tanzimat, (to the left of the entryway) when salvar turn into pants and turbans transform into fezzes, the diachronic organization of the costumes suggests an unpunctuated narrative of developmental progress from the early to the Ottoman period. Conversely, next door in the treasury , the selection of works as 'expensive treasures' - based solely on the materials of which they were made, rather than on their historical use, political implications, or cultural contexts - emphasizes the glamorous wealth of the sultans rather than constructing a seemingly historical, even if simplified and inaccurate, narrative.

The rules that frame the process of visiting also help to construct the stories that visitors understand. While admission to the rest of the museum is relatively inexpensive, additional admission charges to the Harem, witness to the sensualized myths of the Oriental past, and the Treasury, witness to the financial excesses of Oriental despots, promote their fetishization into tropes of a barbaric yet glamorous past which Turks and tourists alike can fold into their pre-packaged notions of a past Easternized to set off the Western identity of modern Turkey and of an East dramaticized in order to unify the otherwise disparate identities of the West. Thus within the museum, each grouping of objects, each setting in which they are placed, and each process of visitation constitutes narrative set up by the process of display within the museum.

This process is no less the case at a small local museum than at a large, urban one. For example, during the early years of the republic, each city was equipped with a local museum, part of which was devoted to ethnographic works and part of which was devoted to archaeological works. These two parts worked in concert to produce a modern local identity which was at the same time tied to the central government and to the new notions of being modern and thereby Turkish. On the one hand, the reinscription of local archaeological finds into a modern institution served to replace ethnic identities with ancient identities tied directly to Anatolian soil. On the other, the reinscription of local costumes and utensils, often familiar to local visitors, as historical presented the new Turkish identity as one that depended on modernity. Between them, relics of the War for Liberation marked the transition between outdated entities of the Ottoman era (symbolized by historicized ethnographic collections) and modern identities that could be constructed on roots autochthenous to Anatolian soil. Through its replication in each city of the republic, the museum at the same time became a symbol of this identity as it was constructed by the central government and performed by the local populace through the Halkevleri often associated with local museums.

Thus while museums ap pear to be benign repositories of objects of value, they not only produce that value as if it were natural, but produce value in order to promote a particular world view that depends on those values. Thus the imaginary jewelry museum suggested above would exist not simply because jewelry is valuable, but because those who create it wish to create a place in which takes on the power to designate particular jewelry as valuable. Such a museum would promote an idea of jewelry as valuable in a different way than an imaginary jewelry library, which would depend instead on the selections of individual users. It would create a 'story of jewelry', which visitors would learn to see as 'the real story,' thus rejecting other stories of jewelry which a different selection might make possible.

As a text, a museum is inherently ideological, as are all texts. A successful museum naturalizes its underlying ideology by creating a desire within the viewer that seems already present, and then scopically satisfies that desire. By failing to completely satisfy the visitor's desire, however, it creates a need for the museum as a place of return, a place of satisfaction that calms desire, until next time. A museum, in other words, is a drug that makes you feel like you always needed it. Nobody is born needing to see nude Hellenistic sculptures or oil paintings. However, by providing access to an ordered display of such works of art, the museum creates a desire for them. Most of us will never have such artworks - and certainly not such a plenitude of works - within our homes. However, the museum makes us want them, just as a man might want the women on Fashion TV. Just as the never ending parade of scantily clad models partially satisfies his desire - he can see but cannot touch; he can possess without the responsabilities of possession - the museum partially satisfies. The desire may seem to be for the women or for the works at hand, but it is also a desire for the ideology underlying the logic of their display: a patriarchal logic that we should live in a world where any man can possess such women; that such Western women form the ideals of desire; a normalization of political power through the exploitation of sexuality. Or a logic that favors the value of particular types of works of art, particular eras of history, and which enhances a material relationship with the world in which we live that is mediated by externally conceived values. Why might the modern world favor such materialism?

While they appear to 'school' public knowledge, museums at once imprison objects and tame the bodies of those who visit them. Thus we must consider not only what happens to objects when they enter the narrative structure of the museum, but what happens to people as well. In some senses, these two aspects are not as disparate as they might seem: both objects and people have a finite lifespan in which they can be said to have presence. For objects, we might think of this era of presence as beginning with the creation of the object (either unique or serial; quotidian or special; simple or complex; cheap or expensive, etc.), continuing with its period of use (including both physical use and/or symbolic use), followed by its period of retaining functional meaning (no longer in use, but identifyable). After this, an object might be forgotten, decay, or no longer retain any clear identity. Where does the museum come in? Theodor W. Adorno famously suggested that the museum is the ' family sepulchre of art ,' suggesting that art leaves the active sphere of the world the moment it comes to be preserved in the halls of the museum. Conversely, we might also conceive of the museum as allowing for an afterlife of an object that otherwise would long since be lost and forgotten, as it all too often is today in the storage spaces where artworks wait. Before we start to feel too sympathetic for the object in either its pain or its pleasure, it is important to remember that it is again people who either kill or resurrect the object to put it in the museum.

What kind of society determines its values through the things that it preserves rather than through those that it produces? Modern museums, with their emphasis on conservation and preservation, emerged during the nineteenth century as the living world began to rapidly be torn down to make way for the future. Along with photography, museums became a way of freezing moments before they entered the past as it approached not only with increasing speed, but also often with an increasing sense of nostalgia. Museums imprison objects by removing them from their everyday functions, but in doing so they also give them eternal life, a bargain, which for humans is the age-old stuff of legend. Thus we might conceive of the museum as a monument to time, a reminder of our own death, which is transcended by the ability of some of the objects that we humans produce to transcend it. In other words, each of us knows of our own limits, spatial, temporal, physical. But by showing me the work of an already-dead artist, I learn that that which I make (if it is worthy, as designated by some social institution such as the museum) may transcend my death, allowing my memory - that which I am in my absence - to achieve some sort of immortality. Thus we as visitors come to transfer hope from objects onto our own bodies, and use preservation as a substitute for the mortality of our own age.

Can any visitor partake in such a promise of transcendence? Perhaps only if they associate their own production with the prom ise of immortality, a function that one might argue is often one of class. Education divides a populace into those with the potential for immortality - those who may practice activities in which they may excell, who may produce 'objects' (physical or metaphorical) destined for the social museum - and those who keep the world in order, but for whom no measure of excellence promises memorialization. Farmers and factory workers, custodians and clerks may excell in their performance of their duties, but they are rarely memorialized as are objects in a museum. Conversely, doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, athletes - professions which depend on extensive training and high levels of specialized skill - promise a potential of memorial transcendence.

As studied extensively by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, those who are most 'schooled' in the language of the museum - the educational and often financial elite - are often the most prepared to read, interpret, and even critique the narratives produced by the museum. They are included within its text, and know the proper behaviours with which to perform its rituals. Not only do they know how to understand what they see, they also know that they should not, for example, talk loudly or touch what they see. They have already learned the socially approved reverence for objects designated as valuable through their inclusion in the museum, and they have internalized the sense of transcendence, which is promised by the museum itself. The desire for the museum is coded within those who also have most thoroughly internalized the values of the society that has produced the museum. Thus for members of the class that designates the museum as an educational institution, it is also a temple to that education that ritually reinforces their sense of belonging. Conversely, those who lack the vocabularies of inclusion in the museum feel excluded by it. They are neither taken in by the promise of transcendence, nor know how to perform the ritual - both spatial and interpretive - of the museum visit, which produces that transcendence.

However, this gap does not inhere in the museum. Museums opened to the public over the course of the nineteenth century wit h the hope that the ritual of the museum would tame the modern body, teaching visitors not only how to act in the musuem, but how to behave within modern democratic society. Museums were to be a repository of a collective heritage for the nascent idea of the nation, owned by the state, which displayed its dependance on the people by displaying its possessions before them. Thus soon after the French Revolution, the Louvre Museum in Paris - the first public museum - displayed the crown of the deposed king beside the staff of the church which kept him in power. This display signaled a government that owned power only because the symbols of power would be kept within the public gaze. Similarly, the first museum to open in the young Turkish Republic was the Topkapi Palace Museum . Even though much of it had been destroyed by fire, and parts of the harem were still in use by the eunichs of the previous sultan, allowing the public onto the grounds of the formerly forbidden palace underscored the deposition of the sultan and the identity of the new government that bestowed the heritage of the country on the people rather than on the ruling family. The presentation of previously forbidden spaces and objects so soon after the fall of the empire served to underscore the nature of the new state, one that owned wealth in the name of the people, sharing it with them. However, such sharing is always ambivalent - the museum is a place, after all where the visitor can possess only through vision, and thus must satisfy any personal desire onto the museum, metonymic of the state, which possesses for him. What's more, the one part of the museum which had been in annual use even after the royal family moved from the palace, the Hirka-i Saadet dairesi which was used for religious ceremonies on the fifteenth of ramazan every year, was not included in the public spaces of the new museum. Thus the museum not only produced citizens for the new state, it also produced them as secular.

As we begin our return to Osman Hamdi's painting of the to rtoises, the notion of a museum as mediating the behaviour of its visitors gains new meaning. Are visitors really the hard-shelled, deaf and dumb pupils that the museum works in vain to affect? If they are, this might indeed explain why museums in Turkey have tended to be void of visitors except for those that cater to the needs of tourists, such as the Topkapi Palace Museum and the Aya Sofya Museum, and those that simultaneously act as sites of religious ritual in a secular context, such as the Topkapi Palace Museum and the Tomb of Mevlana in Konya . Where is the citizen visitor who desires the museum? If the museums have only found tortoises as visitors, if at all, then it is not the fault of people for being tortoises. Rather, museums in Turkey have been more concerned with the afterlife of the object as it inscribes a narrative than in the legibility of that narrative through a communal ritual that conveys a promise and a desire to the visitor. People who desire museums desire them because they provide a sense of inclusion for them, whether on a level of ideology, social class, aesthetic contemplation, personal transcendance, or communal identity. Those who do not feel included by a museum do not desire it; they are, indeed, as tortoises to its ministrations.

While Turkish museums have payed careful attention to narrative, they have rarely situated their narratives in the ritual language of their viewers. This does not mean solely replicating the narratives that viewers already know, such as those of national identity, religious affiliation, or social class. Such a replication makes the museum redundant in the social sphere, shifting it from a dynamic space of contemplation to a conservative space in which existing social values, divisions, and hierarchies are constantly reinforced. Such a museum suffers doubly - it is both exclusive to those who do not understand it and redundant to those who do. Rather, it means creating an educational interface through which viewers can come not only to participate in the ritual of the museum, but to critique and ultimately recreate it as a library of the mind. Thus the visitor is not an abstraction, and the desire for the museum can never be selfless, displaced onto a "somebody else" who needs the museum. A museum is viable through those who partake of its narrative and partake of the desire for its ritual. How and who this ritual includes and excludes, what kind of society it seeks to construct depends on the museum that is desired, and creates it as literally as the objects it chooses to house within.

For example, MassMOCA , a contemporary art museum housed in a former textile plant, is located in an area populated by former textile workers in the Northeastern United States . While during the summer, the Berkshire mountains are a popular retreat for urbanites, most of the year, the museum has to find its audience among a populace that not only might resent the presence of this museum in the buildings where they used to have jobs, but also which knows very little about contemporary art and has few of the educational devices with which to care about it. However, the museum programs its activities to cater to these needs. First, the building itself memorializes the factory rather than hiding its own history. In contrast to the Tate Modern, located in a former electrical plant, the galleries of which rarely reveal their past, MassMOCA uses architecture to remind the visitor of the industrial labor, which took place on the site. Not only are the toilets as they were - no frills, even a little frightening to enter, but a panel invites visitors to cut off the labels of their clothes and pin them to a map. The map commemorates the troubles of the American textile industry, the globalization of which has led to the impoverishment of this region and has allowed this space to become reused as a museum. The exhibits invite hands-on interaction, imitating stores and thereby critiquing them or inviting the visitor to move parts of the work. Such interaction invites, and it creates wonder. And wonder, of course, is the engine of desire.

I began this discussion by asking what is our desire in creating museums today in Istanbul , and I should probably end this discussion by returning to this idea. As Foucault has pointed out, modernity is based on a society of the gaze. Seeing and being seen create our knowledge of the world, providing both our notion of imprisonment and our notions of pleasure. Thinking about the museum, I began to wonder whether this is in fact the case in Istanbul's modernism, where streets are too crowded to promenade; where prisons still, albeit informally, depend on physical punishment; and where museums are on the fringes, not in the center of the public sphere. The public, it would seem, is maybe not one of seeing, but one of hearing (remember Osman Hamdi's flute) - not only hearing the car honking behind you, but hearing what the neighbors say, following the news, talking. Another supposed characteristic of modernism is the fragmentation of the individual, not only symbolically in the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, but in the segmentation experienced as a result of urbanization in the West. Again, this makes me wonder; we live in a very social society, and an art museum is a place where, in theory at least, an individual comes face to face with wonder. It is a quiet place, and for me even a private one inside my own head which has been constituted by many, many museums. But a museum is also a space of public ritual - both of imbibing the narratives spoken through its texts, and of promenading through its measured halls. There are other rituals, too. Those of meeting friends and having something to talk about, maybe about sharing new ideas, and through these projecting a society that is still social among its art. When I ask what is the desire that is building the new museums, I hope that it is this desire at hand - not simply a desire to have a museum because somebody else does, somewhere else in the West, or to have a museum to create an economic value in art. Not simply a desire to create a market, or to support a nation as represented by its material production. I think that desire will ultimately not satisfy; it will leave the halls of the museum as empty as they ever have been. Museums historically have been the haven of the bourgeoisie, a place where they recreate their status through the ritual of museum-visiting, and also where they create value for the art they collect. They create a market for the values of being among the economically and socially elect that they then buy and sell in the form of painting and sculpture. There is not getting around it: museums are created by those who have money. Museums are expensive, after all. But perhaps the best museums are those who know how to be modest in their wealth and share it most generously and invisibly, making themselves present not simply within an elite and narcissistic desire, but past such a desire to the common and childish lust for wonder and rethinking ideology that might make the halls of the museum echo with life.