Courtney - Wednesday 6/1
Mainardi and Sherman's articles both contextualize the debates which structured the reception of the Musée d'Orsay at its origin. These debates occurred between museum senior staff, members of the French state, scholar-critics, and average visitors. The key issues were regarding taste in patronage, conflicting aesthetics, and state politics for new arts institutions. These very issues, Sherman argued, were lost in the museological framework initially employed by the museum. Among the many criticisms launched against the museum by Mainardi and Sherman both, the opacity of the politics underlying curatorial decision-making and the lack of synergy between the museum's professed mission and its display are central. The mission of the new museum was to present the history of art in (practically) the second half of the 19th century as a chronological narrative rather than a hierarchical one. For this reason, artworks that would not otherwise have been hung side by side in their own time were in the museum. This effort did succeed in showcasing a broader history of art in the period. It did not, however, succeed in presenting a "social history of art" in the 19th century. I wonder, in that case, what a "social history of art" would look like in a 21st century museum. In Sherman's article, at least, there appeared a few contradictory visions for such a museum: it shouldn't re-inscribe art historical hierarchies, but should represent changes in historical valuation; it shouldn't bow to the whims of collecting/patronage history, yet it should acknowledge how the collection's structural logic is indebted to such collecting practices; it shouldn't codify some artwork as more or less important based on layout and wall placement, but it should employ more historically-accurate display techniques; it should historically contextualize the artworks as not apart from the broader histories in which they participated, but it should be accessible and engaging for contemporary viewers. Within these sets of apparent contradictions, what would a museum dedicated to the "social history of art" look like? How does the museum today differ from these articles from the late 1980s and early 1990s? Relatedly, how did the exhibition "Enfin le cinéma" embody or reject these founding principles for the Musée d'Orsay?