Notes for ‘the Museum’ with Gervase

The museum as a Way of Seeing – Svetlana Alpers:

The museum removes objects of craft or nature from their original context and
places them in a context of looking.

The museum effect – ‘turning all objects into works of art’

- Simply by placing a work or art in the context of a museum, it assumes
a certain kind of roll.

‘What the museum registers is visual distinction, not necessarily cultural

significance’.

Recent development that groups, nations and even cities have felt that to be
represented in a museum was to be given recognition as a culture.

A measure of a museum’s success might be if people were able to interact with

its works without the need for an audioguide.

MOMA and National Gallery in Washington attempt to sidestep this by separate

room of education or take-home sheets.

Ask question regarding the Ashmoleon. Ashmoleon has gone from a museum in
which looking at objects has been replaced by looking at objects in a setting and
by consciously didactic aids. Good or bad thing.

Whose Art History? Curators, Academics, and the Museum Visitor in Britian –
Stephen Deuchar

Writing as director of Tate Britain before it strictly comes into existence.

Connoisseur – proclaims the sanctity of art as a transforming presence against

the challenge of theory coming from the academy.

Academics – denying any objective aesthetic values independent of cultural

context.

Educators – Sensing and resenting their distance from the curatorial soul of the
museum, arguing for public understanding through the accessibility and
experience of art.

Director – Driven by the twin market forces of corporation and populace toward
the blockbuster and the gift shop and away form the cause of scholarly
enlightenment.

(Where is the place for the student or member of viewing public – deliberately
hierachical sturcutre to Deuchar’s notion of Museum in which the money of the
people but not its other values are considered by elite)
1980s, 3 potentional challenges to trad. Curating in Britian begain to emerge:

1) Thatcherism began to squeeze public fuinding for the arts and to demand
more tangible outputs in terms of the work rater and effectiveness of
those relieving it.
2) A more overtly populist and commercially driven approach to display and
exhibition-making began to emerge. Provided an alternative to objects
‘speaking for themselves’.
3) ‘New Art History’ began to emerge.

Result was a conflict between Academic left wingers and old-school figures of art
history.

Example of new-art history in Tate Modern – postcard exhibition overlooking

turbine hall.

Spiritual experience of traditional viewing vs. academic lesson of new art history.

For example, Documenta, or, how is art history produced? Walter Grasskamp

1978, Wulf Herzogenrath reconstructed an exhibition of 1949 previously called

‘Contempororary German Painting and Sculpture’

‘Art is the perseverance of the survivors/dependents’ motto of Cologne Dada

group Stupid.

Documenta was an exemplar of the genesis and propagation of the priorities of

art history over a period of time.

Notion of a mafia in the way the art world supports and propagates itself.

Others defend the art world by claiming that it is the nature of the work of art, its
attitude to tradition, or the artistic competence of the artist

But it is not possible to deny the world of favours and business acuent in which
the art business nolens volens participates.

No work of art procues its own success, but it must be possible to judge its
quality without reference to the persons who made it successful.

Even more true with respects to modern art in which formal technical quality is
not as easily quantified as with art of the past. The ‘game’ of modern art is highly
subjective in terms of quality and even more power is therefore afforded to the
academic establishment as arbiters of ‘quality’.
The Art Museum as Ritual – Carol Duncan

The disire in designing museums that look like temples, is an attempt to

accoicate the secular cult of art with the bygone days of faith.

Role of museum as preserver of cultural memory.

Ritual and museum should therefore be at opposite ends of the spectrum of our
understanding in the modern day.

Ritual associated with religious practices – with the realm of belief, magic,
sacrifice etc. But in fact can be uspectacular and informal-looking.

We must look to glimpse the disguised ritual content of secular ceremonies.

One can parallel the quietened and carefully demarked museum space with its
wide halls and high ceilings to the temples of worship which they equally
architecturally echo.

‘A temple where Time seems suspended’ Bazin, the creator of the Louvre

One leaves a museum like one does a religious experience feeling in someway as
if one has undergone an experience of some degree of power or enlightenement,
smiritually nourished or restored.

‘a clearing in the jungle; we pass on refreshed, with our capacity for life
increased and with some meory of the sky’

The very capacity of the museum to frame objects as art and claim them for a
new kind of ritual attention could entail the negation or obscuring of other, older
meanings.

The point that carol finishes on raises the most interesting point of her
descussion but she does not pursue it. Does the affect of the viewing space ‘the
anesthetizing lens of museum space’ turn the thermostat into art. Viewed in such
isolated and abstract terms, the meaning extracted from art is not preplanned or
entirely objective, but instead is the non-specific result of the reverie of the
museum goer.

Museum as maker of art.

Place any object in museum, it becomes art.
Collecting/Museums: Donald Preziozi

‘The museum is one of the most brilliant and powerful genres of modern fiction’

‘retroactive rewriting of the history of human societyies’

‘the artist is the very paragon of agency in the modern world and remains so
today’

‘’art’ will be best understood in its fullest sense as the instrumentality or

metalanguage of the museum’s historiographical and psychical confabulations,
as well as that confabulated world of objects itself’

‘disciplining of whole populations through a desire-driven interaction with

objects’

On collecting Art and Culture – James Clifford

‘concerned with the fate of tribal artifacts and cultural practices once they are
relocated in Western museums, exchange systems, disciplinary archives .

adult-child exploring Pitt Rivers.

‘This path through the Pitt Rivers Museum ends with what seems to be a scrap of
autobiography, the vision of a personal ‘forbidden woods’

‘A jounery into otherness’

‘In the West, however, collecting has long been a strategy for the deployment of
possissive self, culture , and uthenticity’

Children’s collections are an example of people attempting to better order the

world around them.
- children are encouraged to keep toy boxes
- accumulation unfolds in a pedagogical, edifying manner.

Suggestion that playing is less a human construct, a la Preziozi, and more

something inate in our nature, a la freud.

“The boundary between collection and fetishism is mediated by classification

and display in tension with accumulation and secrecy”
Freud and collecting, obsessive.

“In the modern Western museum an illusion of a relation between things takes
the place of a social relation.

Do the notions of ‘permanent collection’ and ‘exhibition’ change ideas of cultural

appropriation and ownership?
Key difference in the way objects in museums are viewed between –
anthropological artifact and mysterious and beautiful art object.
Should this be the case?
African mask – interesting.
Leonardo – beautiful.

But is primitive art as used by Picasso radically different from previous

approaches.