The Non-Imaginary Museum

Abstract

Everyone knows how André Malraux has recently called our attention, in a vivid and unacademic way, to a striking peculiarity of our knowledge of art: we all now are—or all now can be—familiar with everything, thanks to what he calls the Museum without Walls, the Imaginary Museum which modern processes of reproduction have so prodigally spread all around us. We all possess all these riches and take them for granted. A student in college today, without ever leaving his Art Building and even without exerting much effort while in it, probably has shown to him a greater quantity of works of art in slides than his grandfather could ever manage to see with years of persistence in looking at books. And the more serious student has available to him much more even than that in the library of his Art Building: an Imaginary Museum stocked with tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of works for which even the late John Russell Pope could not imagine walls enough.