Inside Today’s Museum

Art Room, Frans Francken the Younger, 1636Kunsthistorisches, Vienna

Museum Wormianum, 1655

John Soane’s Museum

‘Arranging Paintings in the Louvre’, Robert Hubert, 1796

Millbank Penitentiary

• William Hazlitt (1778-1830) on the National Gallery

• ‘A sanctuary, a holy of holies, collected by taste, sacred to fame, enriched by the recent products of genius’

Saatchi and Saatchi Ad Campaign

• The V&A

• ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’

Pierre Bourdieu

(1930 – 2002)

• ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste’, 1984

• Taste related to social standing

• ‘Cultural Capital’ - “total, early, imperceptible learning, performed within the family from the earliest days of life”

Carol Duncan, ‘Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums’, 1995

Futurist ManifestoF. T. Marinetti, 1909

• We want to demolish museums and libraries. It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.

• Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid

of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries. • Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of

bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and colour. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?

Institutional Critique

• attempts to make visible the historically and socially constructed boundaries between inside and outside, public and private

• is critical of supposedly disinterested aesthetic

judgement

• claims that taste is institutionally cultivated and differs according to the class, ethnic, sexual and gender backgrounds of art's audiences

Duchamp, ‘A Mile of String’, 1942

Andrea Fraser

Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum

Maryland Historical Society, 1992

New Institutionalism

• A curatorial intention to create “an active space” that is “part community center, part laboratory and part academy” (description of Rooseum in Malmö)

• Experimental and multi-functional approach to curating

• An “attempt to redefine the contemporary art institution [...] ready to let go, not only of the limited discourse of the work of art as a mere object, but also of the whole institutional framework that went with it” (Jonas Ekeberg)

• Nina Möntmann

Richard Serra, Trip Hammer, 1988

Hélio Oiticica 1937-1980

B11 Box Bólide 09, 1964

 

Marisa Merz: Untitled (Living Sculpture) 1966