Knell discusses changes taking place in museums during the latter half of the twentieth century. During this period historians who once found their position scientific were affected by exterior conflicts taking place among scientists, which included disputes over method, authority, the sanctity of evidence, the hand of God, and even the certainties of reality; the result was a shift away from modernism to postmodernism. The ‘post-museum’ identified its future to be a place of pluralism and inclusion, less concerned with the touchable, which made it limitless (both physically and intellectually) in the experiences it could offer. While observing the relationship between ‘post-museums’ and the modern material world, Knell argues that we must put aside any notion that we exist in an era completely unique from any other in terms of experiencing change or changing ways of seeing. To do this, he looks at the history of museums over the past two hundred years in Britain starting with the birth of provincial museums.

After recounting the various phases British museums have gone through in the past two hundred years, Knell focuses on the present, questioning museums’ relationships to the material world by looking at the meaning of objects, reality and consumption. In the past, museums rightly placed objects and collections to the fore as the distinguishing features in museums. Unfortunately, objects are fairly weak resources for constructing history because history is about actions, and to extract actions from objects requires interpretation. The objects are ‘made to speak’ through a human act of authorship creating more debatable ‘truths.’ Since the mid-1960s there has been a change of focus from object to interpreter, pushing the object into the background with a democratizing thrust. Consumerism has become one of the structuring concepts of postmodernism, one from which museums are not exempt: museums are consumed and museums consume. In conclusion, an object’s success is dependent upon how well the museum can take these remnants of the real and suffuse them with socialised and subjective things.