European travelers sought an original already seen in exhibitions and books

Evidence

The Europeans, I have said, arrived in the Middle East without realising that they had left the world-as-exhibition. On the other hand, however, they came looking for a reality which invariably they had already seen in an exhibition. They thought of themselves in other words as actually moving from the exhibit to the real thing. This was literally the case with Théophile Gautier, who lived in Paris writing his Orientalist scenarios for the Opéra-Comique and championing the cause of Orientalist painting. He finally set off for Egypt in 1869 after being inspired to see the real thing by a visit to the Egyptian exhibit at the 1867 Exposition Universelle. But in this respect Gautier was no exception. Europeans in general arrived in the Orient after seeing plans and copies – in pictures, exhibitions and books – of which they were seeking the original; and their purpose was always explained in these terms. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 116

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The doubled asymmetry — being unaware one never left the exhibition while believing one moved from copy to original — is a paradigm-shifting insight about colonial epistemology and the structure of mediated experience.
• XREF: Echoes Baudrillard’s simulacrum/precession of the original, and resonates with the ‘authenticity’ tropes in any tourism-studies literature.