Question

Read the following passage from an essay on the history of museum curation:

In the mid-nineteenth century, the public museum was often less an instrument of democratic education than a grand monument to private conquest. Visitors to these early galleries were greeted not by clean, chronological narratives of human progress, but by a dense, bewildering accumulation of wonders: Roman coins jostling against taxidermied birds of paradise, and fragments of Greek marble displayed alongside lockets of hair from deceased royalty. The curator’s rhetoric, reflected in the guidebooks of the era, was one of untamed marvel. Objects were valued for their ability to evoke "sublime astonishment" rather than to illustrate a historical sequence.

By the turn of the twentieth century, however, a new generation of reform-minded curators sought to tame this wild abundance. Drawing inspiration from the taxonomic rigor of the natural sciences, they began to arrange artifacts in austere, linear sequences. The rhetorical perspective shifted from celebrating the exotic rarity of the individual object to demonstrating the inevitable evolution of material culture. The visitor was no longer invited to marvel at the bizarre anomalies of the world, but to study the orderly progression of human ingenuity. Guidebooks abandoned the language of Romantic awe in favor of clinical instruction, reframing the museum as a silent schoolhouse where the eye was trained to detect subtle improvements in tool design over millennia. Yet, in stripping these objects of their historical clutter, the reformers also drained them of their mystery, replacing a sensory theater of wonders with a dry, didactic narrative of utility.

Based on the passage, which of the following best characterizes the author’s rhetorical perspective regarding the transition from nineteenth-century curiosity cabinets to twentieth-century systematic museum displays?