Page - 136 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

136 siting futurity contentual [sic] or intellectual approach they might be disap- pointed” (Eckhardt 2018). In other words, museumgoers found themselves affected by looking at and wondering about each ob- ject but not only that; unlike the distanced distain of the critics and the melancholy of his movies, these affects were not based on a relentless, debilitating sense of loss. On the contrary: [T]he curators show an admirable optimism in their choices, as if suggesting that human creative powers are the same ev- erywhere and inspire equal wonder, like the titular coffined Spitzmaus (shrew), a tiny wooden sarcophagus from Ptole- maic-period Egypt (fourth century BCE). Time has chipped and dirtied the wood, but this does not matter, since the creature has spent about 2,400 happy years in the afterlife. It is a fitting centrepiece to a truly distinctive exhibition. (Feld- man 2018) The fact that Anderson and Malouf chose not only the Spitz- maus as their centerpiece but to leave the name of the titular coffined creature in the original German in an otherwise global English title points to how affected they were by their discovery of it and how responsible the power to display it made them feel. It became a character for them, one worthy of a name, or per- haps more aptly, a nickname (the German word for nickname is Spitzname), because it had a touching history. Something had brought its coffin to Vienna at some point in the past, where it had found a refuge in the museum’s storage spaces. While it may be true that the show had “Mr. Anderson’s surface-level aesthetic but none of the underlying narrative or emotion of his movies” (Delistraty 2018), the reading of ruin porn in this chapter leads one to query the value of simply generating affect regardless of the quality and directionality of the emotions pro- duced. As we have seen, those generated by The Grand Budapest Hotel tend towards backward-looking melancholy, whereas in establishing that objects are not doomed to be relegated to ar- chival dustbins, the exhibition produced something more posi-