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The generic term ‘museum objects’ suggests that a uniform category is involved. But museums in various disciplines have exhibited objects according to quite different rules and have assigned values to them that depend on the standards of the field of inquiry concerned: aesthetic quality, value as a historical source, as a relic or as a representative item. Over time, various display conventions have become established, which appear to us today to be natural and that assign the objects to specific stimulus values. The aim of this essay is to achieve a better understanding of these exhibition practices and discipline-specific value standards. The study aims to discover why we have become accustomed to using objects in exhibitions in different ways, and it distinguishes between three types of object: work, specimen and witness. The hypothesis here is that each of these follows its own display conventions, forms of perception and standards of value. The present essay aims to situate these three types of object – work, specimen and witness – historically and in this way to articulate the differences in status that exist between them.

This article concerns an exhibition format that I call the depot exhibition. These exhibitions are museum presentations that turn the depot into their subject matter. ("Visible storage" is the most well-known variant.) While this approach to museum exhibition has a current appeal, especially in German-speaking countries, it is not new. Its appearance in North America in the 1970s was connected with postcolonial debates and coincided with a controversial sociopolitical discourse in which the concept of the depot promised to solve the central problems of a particular type of museum: the ethnological museum. I argue that the concept of the depot exhibition had an effect on other types of museums because these kinds of exhibitions made promises that concerned museums in general. The concept is at the root of an influential reflexive museum praxis that is distinguished by self-criticism and the relinquishment of authority from the museum to visitors. [museum, storeroom, depot, exhibition, ethnological museum] museum anthropo lo gy

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