Art Museums

Abstract

This bibliography surveys work on the art museum from a broad-based anthropological perspective, with the caveat that many of the influential, anthropologically inflected studies of art museums have not been produced within the confines of the discipline of anthropology. As such, this bibliography also draws on scholars working within art history, history, sociology, and museum studies/museology highlighting however the benefits of working within an anthropological framework that filters art museums through a lens that is global, cultural, and comparative, and which places the art museum within societal and cultural contexts. Attending to local contexts and histories not only highlights the social worlds that both produce and are produced by museums but highlights the complex power relations that underpin the museum as a global form. Anthropology’s methodological commitments also demonstrate the insights that can be gained through long-term participatory fieldwork and ethnographic writing. The art museum that emerges from within these references is a globalized site of institutional practices of curation, collection, conservation, education, and display, profoundly implicated within discourses about the public, national identity, and citizenship that also vary according to local histories and cultures. In turn, these texts also show how the museum as an institutional form and set of practices contributes to the making of the very category of art. I start by reviewing some foundational texts that have established a baseline for conceptual framings of the art museum as it emerged as a nation-building civic institution in Europe. This section also underscores a more global history of the art museum, intrinsically bound up with colonial power and knowledge systems. From the start, the art museum has been instrumental within discourses and ideologies of the public, regulated through its role in the formation of canonical taste, and through the civilizing rituals of exhibition visiting and art appreciation, which controlled and contained the bodies of the citizenry through careful and attentive viewing practices. Discourses of taste, of high and fine art, and, later, of accessibility expose the ways in which the art museum stratifies the public along lines of class and other distinctions, and fosters nationalist policies and politics of inclusion and exclusion. The following section explores the ways in which the classification and display of artworks in museums are fundamentally bound up with a global politics, and underpinned by colonial value systems. Understandings of art and artifact, primive and modern, are categories emerging from highly racialized worldviews that have been distilled into display strategies that have been salient to the emergence of the display of modern and contemporary art and are baselines for exhibition-making in many museum contexts. This section, on practices of display, is followed by a section on art museums and marketplaces, highlighting the interdependences of both monetary and social value between these two institutional contexts. The subsequent sections explore some of the ways in which art museums are bound up in discussions of contemporary social theory and practices of research, tracking an ongoing dialogue between contemporary art and anthropology. The final section then explores the multiplicity of social practices inculcated within the art museum, here presented under the rubric of care, extending the practice of conservation into broader social domains of cultural heritage preservation, social and historical justice, reparation, and community relations.