Museum Skepticism

Carrier David Carrier

Description

In Museum Skepticism, art historian David Carrier traces the birth, evolution, and decline of the public art museum as an institution meant to spark democratic debate and discussion. Carrier contends that since the inception of the public art museum during the French Revolution, its development has depended on growth: on the expansion of collections, particularly to include works representing non-European cultures, and on the proliferation of art museums around the globe. Arguing that this expansionist project has peaked, he asserts that art museums must now find new ways of making high art relevant to contemporary lives. Ideas and inspiration may be found, he suggests, in mass entertainment such as popular music and movies.Carrier illuminates the public role of art museums by describing the ways they influence how art is seen: through their architecture, their collections, the narratives they offer museum visitors. He insists that an understanding of the art museum must take into account the roles of collectors, curators, and museum architects. Toward that end, he offers a series of case studies, showing how particular museums and their collections evolved. Among those who figure prominently are Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, the first director of the Louvre; Bernard Berenson, whose connoisseurship helped Isabella Stewart Gardner found her museum in Boston; Ernest Fenollosa, who assembled much of the Asian art collection now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Albert Barnes, the distinguished collector of modernist painting; and Richard Meier, architect of the J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles. Carrier's learned consideration of what the art museum is and has been provides the basis for understanding the radical transformation of its public role now under way.

Sujets

• History of art

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822387572
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

               

          

M U S E U M

S K E P T I C I S M

A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries

                  

Durham and London 

©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper 

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Adobe Garamond

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

nd printing, 

f o r            ,

               ,

          ,

a n d       

a n d f o r

            ,

w i t h o u t w h o m

n o t

        is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind. You heavenly powers, since you were responsible for those changes, as for all else, look favourably on my attempts, and spin an unbroken thread of verse, from the earliest beginnings of the world, down to my own times. —   , Metamorphoses

      Achilles chooses is an image of all life as Homer understood it. . . . It is only because life is irretrievable and irrepeatable that the glory of appearance can reach such intensity. Here there is no hidden meaning, no reference to, nor hint of, anything else. . . . Here appearance is everything. —             , The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

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       



ix

‘‘Beauty and Art, History and Fame and Power’’:

On Entering the Louvre



Art and Power: Time Travel in the Museum

Museum Skeptics



Picturing Museum Skepticism 

Art Museum Narratives



Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Museum



Ernest Fenollosa’s History of Asian Art



Albert Barnes’s Foundation and the Place of

Modernist Art within the Art Museum





The Display of Absolutely Contemporary Art in

the J. Paul Getty Museum



The End of the Modern Public Art Museum:

A Tale of Two Cities



         : What the Public Art Museum

Might Become

    



           

    







Acknowledgments

Art,ars), means ‘‘deception,’’ and . . . the artist (suspending disbelief

must participate in his own illusion, if it is to be convincing. He must

fool himself.—           

Guided by a Hegelian philosophical framework presented in the over- ture, this book employs case studies to explain the origin of the modern public art museum, describe how it developed, and indicate why now it is undergoing a radical transformation. Research began on March , , when I started reading Thomas Crow’sPainters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. His analysis of art in the public sphere provided one central idea, but I didn’t know that until I began writing in . It took me two years to understand the central importance of museum skepticism and three more years to comprehend fully how to use that concept in my historical discussion. The final argument was worked out in April , thanks to Eleanor Munro’sMemoir of a Modernist’s Daugh- ter, which showed how to link Crow’s discussion to discussion of the present fate of the museum. My use of Ovid’s conception of metamor- phosis builds self-consciously upon Paul Barolsky’s claims. In writing art history, he argues, we need to acknowledge that ‘‘our understanding of art, far richer than the sum of the documented facts, is itself fictive, given form by a web of poetic influences that escape detection in conventional 1 exegesis.’’ Within such narratives a firm dividing line between strict his- torical truth and creative fiction may be impossible to establish. I play the philosopher’s inevitable concern with truth against the creative writer’s natural fascination with metamorphosis, with resolution coming only in the conclusion, where the distinction between what is and what might be is deconstructed. Like successful visual artists, art writers have a personal style. Once you have done a number of books, then (so I have found) the basic ma-