The Spatial Dialectics of Authenticity

Abstract

The question of authenticity in art appears historically and directly linked to the question of art's place and the modalities of its placement. The protracted practice of removal and collection of authentic works of art in a sequestered place, of which the art museum is the modern manifestation, is directly linked, in turn, to Western ideational trepidations about art and representation. To trace these links, I will begin with an overview of the history of the place and the placement of art, beginning with the cabinet of curiosities, to the founding of the art museum as a building type in Berlin during the third decade of the 19th century. The elaborate spacing and the experiential journey of disjointure that were codified in Berlin and since have been the persistent measures of success in art museum design are, I contend, a humanist institutional response to the enigmatic place of art and its inherent supplemental and paradoxical character as a mode of representation. The fabrication of the art museum as a disjoined space is, persistent as it has been, a cultural substitute for what is fundamentally missing and missed: an outside to representation. As an institution and a building type, the art museum effectively fabricates an outside to representation. It substitutes a formal, spatial, and experiential clarity of place for the very spatial and temporal dimensions that painting and sculpture fundamentally put in question. The institution of the art museum is, I contend, an instituted resistance to representation. Spacing is authenticity's indispensable alibi. The museum is its incessant realization.