OK, like Bravus, I'm asking you guys to help out with the homework...

I'm writing a piece about museums, and it suddenly hit me that one has to go back to 1870-1914 to find a museum-boom equivalent to the one we've experienced from 1968-now...

Then the associations started flowing: We too recycle form, from music over architecture to fashion. We have our great empire with its proxy- and colonial wars.

We have exploding cities and uncontrolled migration. We have more new technology than we can handle, and yet we build museums to preserve the past and the present in every field of knowledge.

Like then, the ways of governance are changing, and like then, we have no clue in what direction we are heading.

Sci-fi geeks: will we too have our 'Great War' (thats the one 1914-1918 to you young ones )? will we have our 'Russian Revolution'? And how will they look? Certainly not like theirs, I am not thinking of any literal likenesses. Will our great American Empire end like the British one, without noticing before its too late? And who will then replace it - the Chinese?

History-geeks: does this analogy hold water? Its just an image, I'm not attempting at any identity, and I believe that would be absurd, too. But can anyone else out there see the point?
They had Toynbee, we have Huntingdon. Fukuyama really wants to be our Hegel, damn it. What else is similar, that I don't know of?

Any ideas?

I guess I'm in the camp that says history doesn't repeat itself, it only reminisces.

Offhand, I'd say you have a case of medical student's hypochondria. Many a medical student, at some point in their career, develops some degree of hyphochondria, as a product of all the new medical information they're trying to absorb, and the stresses of trying to keep up that inevitably produce symptoms.

Or maybe not, but I'd say it's a question you might want to ask. Find a random number generator, pick any 2 sets of years, and I bet you can find some eerie parallels. Pick 1870-1914 and any other 44 year period, and i bet you can find some eerie parallels.

And nothing personal, and maybe it's because I just finished a bout of reading several history books, but I don't really know as I'd say your characterizations are as eerily parallel as it might seem. And if you're suggesting a turnover of world power status after a period of a culture memorializing itself, wouldn't you be looking for parallels between museum building in Britain or France while they were world powers? The U.S. became a world power in 1918, it didn't cease to become one.

Bellham

This was one of my favorite Bruce Sterling quotes (okay, actually the only Sterling quote I know. Haven't read much of him, few of his novels are published here). But as I googled for the exact quote, I found out that it might not be Sterling's at all. Some say it was Mark Twain's, other say it's Karl Marx's. Even found some others. Who's is it?

Sorry to be off topic. Just curious.

that isnt off topic - but exactly what I'm looking for! I've no intention of making a scientific dissertation, its more like a mind-game, to point out some stuff I can see, but I don't know how to explain. My job is to rant about the boom in museum-construction, not to save the world

Maybe instead of looking for other 'cycle's in history that followed periods of museum building, you could look for any commonalities that preceeded museum building. Offhand, I'd imagine wars would prompt museum building, especially wars won by a country. If there were such a pattern, it would be less of a correlation with what followed museum building than what came before.

Bellham

After the Napoleonic wars the UK didn't really get involved in any economy busting wars till the Great War. I think, with the empire supplying an ever-expanding industrial base as the world was being explored, building museums became a useful 'sink' (or long-term investment) for surplus capital. Thus I would expect to see museum building as the result of periods of relatively peaceful prosperity.
It may relevant that, IIRC, Clausewitz said 'It is necessary to have a war every 50 years to stop the merchants taking over.'

I do not see such a museum building craze around here, as we had plenty of them already. Most of them started with the Borbons (XVIIIth century) and many more in the XIXth. And Spain was going severely downhill from at least a century earlier.

I suspect you need a powerful rich government, or one who wants to look like one.

Or maybe you are just catching up, after seeing lots of museums in travels abroad?

José

when I was in pharmacy school I experienced it to an extent but not as much as one guy in my class.After we did diseases of the liver he was convinced that he had liver problems. Since the symptoms of most liver diseases are vague ie fatigue and maliase, he went to have a work up done and when the test results came back inconclusive the doctor decided to do a liver biopsy. He ended up getting a peritoneal infection and had to have a colinostomy,spent months in the hospital, missed his last year of pharmacy school and almost ended up homeless because he couldnt work.

I found the sterling-interview (1997) where that quote came from.

"We are all mired in historical circumstance. Some of us are knee-deep, and some of us are neck-deep. If you want to think seriously about the future, you have to think historically. There isn't any other way to do it. Otherwise you'll mistake the accidents of our current situation for some iron-clad law of the cosmos. You need to be aware of longer-term trends, how things play out. History never repeats itself, but it does kind of rhyme.
We're living controversies now, like in the former Yugoslavia, that clearly have roots that are centuries old. Certain issues come up over and over again, there are certain trouble spots that flare up, and there are certain weaknesses in Western society that come up with regularity. If you don't study history and try to get a grip on these things, you'll never get anywhere."

(Still not sure this is what you're looking for.)

Great response guys - I'm going to work from the point that its not some never ending big wheel of history repeating itself, but rather some similar conditions that lead to similar (not identical) products.
In that light I would actually see the lack of new museums in Spain as a confirmation of the 'thingy' I'm trying to articulate. The Spanish are still too busy building a nation to be interested in its preservation. (But my guess is the Bilbao is only the first of many, wait and see..) The German museum-boom was in the 1980's and early 90's, well after the postwar economic reconstruction. They had the infrastucture, the money, the goods, and then they felt they needed identities, too.
Its all because I think museums are really strange - why do we - as nations - keep all this useless stuff? And at the same time I really love museums, the culture in them is like institutionalized geekdom.
I once worked for a great antropological collection, where the very controversial director was all for giving items back to the original owners. His point was that the 300.000 items never ever would be accessible to the public as long as they were there. It was just meaningless hoarding, into stacks that grew every year, with no end in sight. Of course, the board asked him not to voice his opinion in public....
Art-museums are even weirder, with their own whole industry of artists producing 'only for museum'-pieces. I think it's great, but it makes me wonder.

I think Art Museums and Galleries are an offshoot all of their own. Obviously the late C20th boom in 'mediated' art means that whole schools of artmaking have sprung up that depend on critics and galleries for their existence and could never survive as mere objects in the wider world without someone to explain them.
In the area of London where I am - shoreditch - there has been an explosion of galleries in the last five years. The art market needs speculators and there's an endless pool of wannabe YBAs ready to supply the raw material and dealers to try and make money off them.
It's like a gold rush out there!