Art Museums, Autonomy, and Canons

Abstract

Museums influence society's ideas about canons in relation to art and the aesthetic. Such canons, as represented in museum exhibitions and col lections, have sometimes been criticized (often legitimately in my view) for exclusion of artists from some (unjustifiably marginalized) groups. These artists include members of racial minorities, women, and others. It may be objected that there is a danger in some such criticism. Group membership might, it may be said, come to matter too much in choices by museums, rather than what should matter, producing and appreciating work of the highest artistic or aesthetic value (work also satisfying other conditions of canonical status).1 When this objection arises, various fears are at issue. There may be, for example, concern that issues properly artistic and aesthetic are being politicized in such a way that objective value or its absence is being overlooked. There may be the related concern that revised judgments about canonical value are being forced upon us, or that we are being manipulated, perhaps; that such judgments are not freely decided upon. There are other fears, but these two are of special interest in this essay. I argue here, not for the elimination of canons, but for testing, challenging, and supplementing of currently dominant canons in museum contexts by a variety of means. The testing, etc., should include subjecting traditional canons to the competition (in museum contexts) of deviant and alternative canons, and valuable work of currently doubtful canonicity. I do not try to describe all the forms such testing, and so on, should take, but only some. Without testing, challenging, and supplementing, it seems to me, the dominant canons, fortified by the prestige and practices of influen tial museums, contribute to the imposition of illegitimate authority, a viola tion of respect for autonomy in judgments about art and the aesthetic. What autonomy is, and whose autonomy is at issue (including unjustifiably marginalized artists, and the public whose experience is narrowed) will be discussed more as we proceed. It should be said immediately that the unjustifiably marginalized ar tists, and the groups whose sensibility they often express, are definitely among those whose autonomy is damaged. Others, too, however, sometimes ignorant of the process of unjustifiable marginalization, and of the possibilities of alternative approaches to canons, lack appreciation of