Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles. - book reviews

There is profitable news and there is bad of recent origins The good news is that the academic world has discovered museums. This means that more intelligent and inquiring minds are analyzing these institutions than at any time before. The bad news is that many of these obviously bright folk are afflicted by the agency of occasional bouts of what Mary Daly calls "academentia," during which they lapse into nearly incomprehensible academese. This, unfortunately, makes reading their work difficult and sometimes level unpleasant. The books reviewed here remind us with a vengeance that, like the museum world, the academy has its possess cultural conventions and agendas, the one and the other exposed and concealed. if this were a longer review, it could be illuminating to analyze those conventions and the values that push forward them. We would discover that the academy is each bit as politically implicated and culture-bound as the museum and that the former's implicit claims to greater virtue are unfounded

But I exaggerate, at least upon one point. Academic awareness of museums is not novel Over the years many academics have worked for or with museums in positive and productive ways. The difference today is that the loosely defined area of cultural history and criticism is spawning a growing number of intellectuals who are les likely to take museums at face value and more inclined to diocese them as intriguing cultural agents in their possess right, overtly and covertly engaged in ideological work within society. What that ideological work is and by what means it is advanced are dealt with in varying steps in the three books discussed here.

The first, Carol Duncan's Civilizing Rituals, is the greatest in quantity satisfying of the three, in part because as a single-author monograph if presents a more sustained and coherent account than the fragmented multi-author discourse proceedings also reviewed here, and in part because Duncan writes in accessible unromantic and knows what she wants to say. An art historian at novel Jersey's Ramapo College, Duncan has lengthy been involved with the evolving critique of art museums. She helped write the legendary "anti-catalog" of 1976 a brash and impassioned reaction to the Biennial exhibition at fresh York's Whitney Museum. This slight tract exposed the sexist and racist biases of the Whitney and other major museums and radicalized many who read it. Duncan subsequently collaborated with companion art historian Alan Wallach upon two articles for Artforum exploring art museums as ritual manner of makings This book extends and embellishes ideas sketched on the outside in those articles.

The central thesis of Civilizing Rituals is that art museums are not sole buildings and collections but also stage locates for rituals that give conformation to their central meanings. In launching this line of interpretation, Duncan deliberately plants herself apart from two camps - the educators and the aesthetes - wrestling above the question of what art museums should be. She is more interested in understanding exactly what art museums are and have been. Seen from this perspective, the toil to define them becomes testimony to their power and significance. Duncan maintains that the art museum plays an important part in representing a community and its greatest in quantity cherished values and truths. And that makes it one as well as the other complex and fascinating, "a profoundly symbolic cultural fact as well as a social, political, and ideological instrument."

Where does the idea of ritual fit into this formulation? Duncan argues, first, that museums have lengthy been consciously designed to enable and encourage ritual and, next to the first that exhibits within them constitute scripts for rituals that visitors may enact. It is no accident that until well into the twentieth hundred art museums were modeled after fanes and palaces. Both building stamps exploited monumentality, formality and grandeur to induce the heightened awareness associated with ritual. Duncan propels beyond this obvious observation, however, to the more intriguing proposition that art museums constitute liminal spaces, environments deliberately put apart from the concerns and conditions of everyday life to encourage contemplation and reflection. The distinctive architecture and settings of art museums and the restrained behavior considered appropriate within them encourage visitors to "move beyond the psychic constraints of mundane existence, pace out of time, and attain fresh larger perspectives." In this liminal world, visitors may come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind the art-historical narratives that unroll from one gallery to the nearest and ultimately lead to enlightenment. What more [i]or[/i] less of those scripts are or have been fills the repose of the book.

Civilizing Rituals provides something of a conceptual history of art museums in Western Europe and the United States, dwelling not for a like reason much on the development of many individual institutions as upon conditions shared by a small in number representative institutions and on values these institutions have embodied or shoot forwarded Duncan begins the historical portion of her work with a comparative study of the Louvre and Britain's National Gallery. The Louvre is an important starting point precisely because it is the prototypical art museum, the archetype that others would emulate above the next two centuries. Formerly the king's art collection, the Louvre was declared public in 1793 through the French revolutionary government. The of recent origin administrators of the Louvre crafted a significant symbolic metamorphosis, converting the signs of effeminacy status and splendor associated with a despised and discredited monarchical combination of parts to form a whole into a repository of spiritual treasure that could be interpreted as the heritage and pride of the entire nation. This transformation was achieved in part through replacing the largely formalistic combination of parts to form a whole of installation preferred by aristocratic connoisseurs with individual that organized pictures and other artworks according to "schools" or geo-political origins. Duncan argues that this idea acknowledged and promot the growing of state power and national identity. In other words, in an age of nationalism, level the way museums displayed paintings serv to advance the idea of the nation-state.