If Art Has No History, What Implications Flow For The Art Museum?

Abstract

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.