Fake or Fortune? Alexander Dorner and the Weimar Reproductions Debate

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

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.

About the Authors

I have recently argued in various places that each kind (as the word is defined in the paper) has a history, and only kinds have histories. Because ‘art’ is shown not to be the name of a kind it does not name a kind with a history. This conclusion relies upon a meme-driven account of cultural evolution, providing historical studies in general with a rationale running intellectually parallel to that which sustains objective accounts of biological evolution. I propose that the word ‘art’ should not be used in the conventional way but as a name for the general category of memetic innovation, and the phrase ‘work of art’ as a name for the items of the class of entities inspected by an unprompted eye in search of memetic innovation. These arguments are recapitulated in a form encouraging speculation about their consequences for the art museum and gallery. One effect of a conceptual revision would be to widen the scope of the art museum: on the face of it, without restriction. In order to impose a practical constraint it is suggested that an institutional criterion might be applied to acquisitions and display policies, simultaneously and consistently with a rejection of the Institutional Theory of Art that is currently influential in the art world. It is further argued that the art gallery should be conceived primarily as a domain of entertainment with the underlying function of encouraging creative discovery by the unprompted eye, and not as an art-historically instructive domain. The art museum's collection will inevitably lend itself to study and presentation in various intellectually coherent patterns by cultural historians, but—if the thesis is correct—not by those ‘art historians’ who mistakenly suppose that a bogus ‘history of art’ provides an appropriate structure for the understanding of works of art.

Wilhelm von Bode, 1845-1929, whose full name is Arnold Wilhelm von Bode, added the word "Feng" to his family name after being granted the title of nobility in 1914. He was a famous German art historian, museum director and founder of museology in the 19th century, and served as the general curator of the Berlin Museum from 1905 to 1920. In Bode's more than half a century long art museum work and art appraisal activities, he has identified countless works of art, and it is impossible to accurately count how many works of art he has evaluated and collected for the Berlin Art Museum and other art museums in Germany. His achievements in art appraisal have almost become a legend. These events recorded in the art history present Bode's specific details and ideas in the work of art appraisal, and more clearly delineate the intricate relationship between art appraisal and other social factors in the country's cultural construction.

<p>This thesis examines issues of access to art museums and galleries for young children attending early childhood (EC) centres, the ways in which the EC sector uses the institutions to enhance young children’s learning, and the relationship art museums and galleries have with New Zealand’s youngest citizens. It is the first in-depth study of young children’s use of art museums and galleries in Aotearoa New Zealand. A mixed methods approach to the research involved a range of data gathering tools to observe, document, and analyse the practices and attitudes towards art museum visiting by the EC sector. Key participants were EC teachers, art museum directors, and art museum educators. Rich quantitative and qualitative data were elicited from a national survey of 17 of New Zealand’s largest art museums and galleries, an extensive national online questionnaire to EC centres, and an embedded case study of three EC centres who visited art museums as part of the research. Bourdieu’s key concepts of habitus, cultural capital and, particularly, field provide the fundamental tools for analysis within this inquiry. These have been used to examine and attempt to explain why some EC teachers visit art museums and galleries with young children while others do not, and understand issues of power within the field of art education in an art museum or gallery. The study found that there are both facilitators and barriers to art museum and gallery visiting by the EC sector. Barriers included: funding limitations, teachers’ fears about using art museums and galleries with young children, lack of professional development for teachers, and poor marketing of exhibitions to the EC sector. Facilitators included EC teachers’ positive perceptions of art museums and galleries as places for enriching and extending young children’s visual arts education, visual art pedagogical practices that support visiting, and the willingness of some art museums and galleries to work with the EC sector. On the basis of the findings from all three phases of the research and informed by the literature reviews and the conceptual tools used in the analysis of data, a ‘third space’ for art education in art museums and galleries for young children attending EC centres is proposed.</p>

<p>This thesis examines issues of access to art museums and galleries for young children attending early childhood (EC) centres, the ways in which the EC sector uses the institutions to enhance young children’s learning, and the relationship art museums and galleries have with New Zealand’s youngest citizens. It is the first in-depth study of young children’s use of art museums and galleries in Aotearoa New Zealand. A mixed methods approach to the research involved a range of data gathering tools to observe, document, and analyse the practices and attitudes towards art museum visiting by the EC sector. Key participants were EC teachers, art museum directors, and art museum educators. Rich quantitative and qualitative data were elicited from a national survey of 17 of New Zealand’s largest art museums and galleries, an extensive national online questionnaire to EC centres, and an embedded case study of three EC centres who visited art museums as part of the research. Bourdieu’s key concepts of habitus, cultural capital and, particularly, field provide the fundamental tools for analysis within this inquiry. These have been used to examine and attempt to explain why some EC teachers visit art museums and galleries with young children while others do not, and understand issues of power within the field of art education in an art museum or gallery. The study found that there are both facilitators and barriers to art museum and gallery visiting by the EC sector. Barriers included: funding limitations, teachers’ fears about using art museums and galleries with young children, lack of professional development for teachers, and poor marketing of exhibitions to the EC sector. Facilitators included EC teachers’ positive perceptions of art museums and galleries as places for enriching and extending young children’s visual arts education, visual art pedagogical practices that support visiting, and the willingness of some art museums and galleries to work with the EC sector. On the basis of the findings from all three phases of the research and informed by the literature reviews and the conceptual tools used in the analysis of data, a ‘third space’ for art education in art museums and galleries for young children attending EC centres is proposed.</p>

A groundbreaking theoretician working at the intersection of art, psychoanalysis, feminine sexuality, ethics and aesthetics, she is the author of several books and more than eighty psychoanalytical essays on what she has named "matrix" and "matrixial trans-subjectivity" since the mid 1980s. Her book The Matrixial Borderspace (essays from 1994-1999) appeared in English in 2006 (published by the University of Minnesota Press with a foreword by Judith Butler, an introduction by Griselda Pollock, and an afterword by Brian Massumi who also edited the collection). She is a practicing psychoanalyst and holds together the practice of artist and of psychoanalyst in a unique way. Her co-authored series of conversations with Emmanuel Lévinas, Edmond Jabès, Félix Guattari, Christian Boltanski and other artists and philosophers are considered, alongside her notebooks, photography, scannography, and painting, as major contributions to contemporary art and culture. She has also published famous photographs of Jean-François Lyotard, Jabès, Lévinas, Joyce McDougall and others. Ettinger is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Art at the Media & Communications Division of the European Graduate School in Saas Fee (Switzerland). A recent selection of her solo exhibitions includes the Freud Museum (June-July 2009) in London, the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (August 2009), the Tapies Foundation, Barcelona (May 2010) and the Freud Dream Museum, St Petersburg (September 2010). Her paintings, photos, drawings and notebooks have been exhibited extensively in major museums of contemporary art and her solo exhibitions include Le Palais des beaux-Arts, Brussels (2000) and The Drawing Center, New York (2001). She has participated in group exhibitions at Centre G. Pompidou, Paris and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and her recent group exhibitions include Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (2006-2007) and The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp (2006). Her paintings and drawings are included in public collections at Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), Pori Museum of Art (Finland), Israel Museum (Jerusalem), Museum of Modern Art (England), Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Israel) and Pompidou Centre (Paris). Ettinger's artistic work is a subject of reflection and research for a number of art historians and philosophers. The art historian Griselda Pollock and the philosophers Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Judith Butler, have each dedicated several essays to her pioneering art and renovating thought - art and thought that have influenced not only the visual arts and psychoanalysis of the last two decades but also different fields such as contemporary philosophy, queer and gender studies and the domains of film and literature.

Museum Laboratories: Where Art Meets Science

In recent years, the critical study of museums has emerged as a major focus of scholarly inquiry across various disciplines, bringing into greater focus the effect that museum practice has on the formation of meaning and the public perception of objects. Representing Africa in American Art Museums is the first comprehensive book to focus on the history of African art in American art museums. Chronicling more than a century of building and presenting collections of African art in thirteen American art museums, from the late 1800s to the present, the book considers the art museum as a lens for understanding the shifting visions of African art that are manifested in institutional practices of collecting and display in the United States. Thirteen essays present the institutional biographies of African art collections in a selection of American art museums: the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Hampton University Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Barnes Foundation, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Primitive Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indiana University Art Museum, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the University of Iowa Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Menil Collection, and the National Museum of African Art. Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke offer a review of the history of collecting and displaying African art in American museums and identify important issues that are raised by the essays: defining aesthetic criteria for African art and for its display; breaking free from the monolithic rubric of primitive broadening perceptions of what constitutes African art; and formulating a place for context and culture in understanding and presenting African art. Representing Africa in American Art Museums concludes with an afterword that anticipates the direction for the collecting and display of African art in the twenty-first century, including the ethics and legalities of collecting; the deconstruction of a singular and authoritative museum voice in interpreting works of art; the interests and engagement of local African American and African communities that have a stake in how collections are represented; and how, if, and where to include contemporary art from Africa in museum collections.

This study unites the burgeoning academic field of exhibition histories and the critiques of race-based exhibition practices that crystallised in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. It concerns recent practices of presenting and contextualising black creativity in British publicly funded art museums and galleries that are part of a broader attempt to increase the diversity of histories and perspectives represented in public art collections and exhibitions. The research focuses on three concurrent 2010 exhibitions that aimed to offer a non-hegemonic reading of black creativity through the use of non-art-historical conceptual and alternative curatorial models: Afro Modern (Tate Liverpool), Action (The Bluecoat), and a retrospective of works by Chris Ofili (Tate Britain). Comparative exhibitions of the past were typically premised on concepts of difference that ultimately resulted in the notional separation of black artists from mainstream discourses on contemporary art and histories of British art. Through a close and critical textual analysis of these three recent exhibitions, which is informed by J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts (1955), the study considers whether, and to what extent the delimiting curatorial practices of the past have been successfully abandoned by public art museums and galleries, and furthermore, whether it has been possible for British art institutions to reject the entrenched, exclusive conceptions of British culture that negated black contributions to the canon and narratives of British art in the first place. The exhibition case studies are complemented and contextualised by an in-depth history of the Bluecoat’s engagement with black creativity between 1976 and 2012, which provides a particular insight into the ways that debates about representation, difference and separatism have impacted the policies and practices of one culturally significant art gallery that is frequently overlooked in histories of black British art. With reference to the notion of legitimate coercion as defined by Zygmunt Bauman (2000), the study determines that long-standing hegemonic structures continue to inform the modes through which public art museums and galleries in Britain curate and control black creativity.

Smartphone users have a new habit of taking selfies then posting to Instagram or Facebook which will then be liked and commented on by their friends. This selfie culture influences the visitors of fine arts exhibitions and museums driving the urge to take a selfie in front of the work on display. Taking a selfie in front of a work of art seems to show the self-expression and self-identity of the performer. Selfie photos have similarities with self-portrait paintings by famous painters from the Reneisance era to the present. Selfie culture has influenced the behavior of millennials in appreciating works of art. Some applications that support selfie culture have been developed and gives smartphone users the opportunity to use it to create new interpretations of images. This article discusses the shift in exhibit behavior at the fine arts museum which is shown through photos uploaded on social media.
 Keywords: social media, selfies, art museum

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967

Art galleries are known as places that exhibit both art and artworks such as paintings or sculpture. However, an art gallery is supposed to be a platform to enhance not only the quality of fine art but also as the introduction of new art and design products. Based on this notion, this study aimed to redefine the role of the art gallery in order to enhance the development of the art and design industry which not only includes exhibiting fine art artwork but also in terms of promoting and introducing new art and design products. In this research, the researchers first adopted an observation approach to collect data. Secondly, the researchers interviewed the gallery curators. Both government and private galleries were sampled. Structured questions were used in designing the questionnaire which focused on the role of the art gallery as an art centre as well as the function of the existing art galleries. Findings from this study focused on how art galleries in Malaysia did not have knowledge about the real function of art galleries and why they held to their strategies of making profits only from exhibiting fine art. This study should help to expand the functions of art galleries by promoting and exhibiting all types of art and design works. Also, public programming or activities such as art competitions and art seminars can be held in the art galleries as well.

Some Preliminary Responses to “Beyond Single Stories”