The Science Museum in London still had Maudslay's lathe on display. Maudslay's lathe is the direct ancestor of all modern lathes, with its slide rest and the leadscrew drive. No previous lathe was like that. So it's one of those rare artifacts that changed the world. People walk by it to get to see James Bond's car. That was the strength of that museum - they had some of the first examples of key advances.
The Henry Ford Museum used to have really obscure items. "Capacitor, Cornell-Dublier, 1938". A combination television camera and kinescope projector for rotating disk television. Then they added explanatory exhibits and pushed aside the small obscure stuff. That was probably for the best; it was like a really well funded antique shop. The kids just want to see the locomotives, anyway.
The Smithsonian was once called "The Nation's Attic". Now, most of the obscure stuff has been moved out to storage in favor of more understandable exhibits. They used to have a history of clock escapements, with a working model of each type, kept wound and running. No more. The Arts and Industries Building had even older stuff. Their stamp collection had examples of all US stamps.
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co46284...
It's so enriching to see one of these artifacts - I don't think it's quite possible to understand the feeling without seeing one of them in real life.
A really memorable moment was stubmling across the two oldest surviving printing presses at a small museum in Antwerp - [the Plantin-Moretus museum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantin%E2%80%93Moretus_Museum).
Everybody strolled right by it - for me, just looking at it made me feel more connected to the history of the written word.
Exit Through the Gift Shop remains integral to our moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop
I think he is observing that we live in a fundamentalist age. By "fundamentalist" I mean "there's one right answer", that is, no nuance. Even on the political Left, where you normally find some nuance, you get a fundamentalism that requires interpreting everything through an oppressor/victim lens that assigns groups to one or the other. So Palestinians are "victim", despite the fact that the Muslim view of homosexuality would be categorized "oppressive". White people are "oppressor" because they enslaved people, despite the fact that young white men died by the hundreds of thousands in a war to end slavery, and that the British Empire ended slavery in the Ottoman Empire by refusing to trade with them if they continued slavery.
"When I say literalism, I don't mean realistic or plainly literal. I mean literalist, as when we say something is on the nose or heavy-handed, that it hammers away at us or beats a dead horse. As these phrases imply, to re-state the screamingly obvious does a kind of violence to art. "A point is still a point!""
Hope this is helpful.
[0]https://www.newyorker.com/culture/critics-notebook/the-new-l...
For example, Hans Haacke had a piece which was literally documenting the provenance of a museum's Manet painting to reveal a connection between the donor and the Nazis. That's literal, but I hope most here would think it's not at all superficial.