Course Information

Meetings

 

Visual Culture
Professor: Brian Goldfarb | Winter 2005 UCSD

Week 5 Notes: Collecting and Exhibiting

 

James Clifford "On Collecting Art and Culture"

Thursday: The Multiplication and Circulation of Images

 

Walter Benjamin "A Small History of Photography" (OR)

 

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, "Chapter 4: Reproduction and Visual Technologies" (PL)

Images:

 

 

 

Carol Duncan Art Museums and rituals of Citizenship

 

Modernism and Abstraction

Addressing the Museum

 

 

Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust, two thousand years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them. The present is burthened too much with the past.
--Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64)


Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to coordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? . . . A museum is not a firsthand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
-- D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)


Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly impostors. . . . We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

 

Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells--in other words, neutral rooms called 'galleries.' A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged form the outside world. A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral.
-- Robert Smithson (1938-1973)