Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
Museums and the Construction of Art Histories
Convenors:
Chris Whitehead, Newcastle University of Newcastle upon Tyne chris.whitehead@ncl.ac.uk
Bernadette Buckley, Newcastle University bernadette.buckley@ncl.ac.uk
What are the roles of art museums and galleries in the construction of narratives of art and of art history as a discipline? This session examines recent museum and gallery initiatives which seek either to challenge or to further invest in conventional art historical narratives, categories and canons. It asks how museums and galleries seek to build on or interrupt the creation of art historical narratives – for example through forms of display, collecting, deaccessioning and programming exhibitions, or through the attribution of a special national value to specific works of art.
The intellectual project of rethinking art history in the museum is inextricable from institutional and cultural policies and politics and from funding opportunities. This institutional confusion of intellectual revisionism, display imperatives and the politically and economically contingent nature of boundary work is of special interest, as it illuminates the essentially contingent (and therefore ‘impure’?) nature of the representation of art histories in museums and galleries. This session builds on, and brings together, a number of bodies of thought. These include: studies of the museum and gallery as art historical ‘text’; considerations about the relationships between ‘art’ and ‘visual culture’; developing interests in the ‘new institutionalism’; interests in the formation of artists’ museums and archives; studies of disciplines and disciplinarily; and studies of art historical narratives both within and beyond the museum.
Speakers:
Alexandra Stara (Kingston University)
Aestheticising the Other: the new new Musée du Quai Branly in Paris
Stijn Van De Vyver (Ghent University)
Laying Down the Law: Flemish Masterpieces Law and the construction of narratives in museums of contemporary art
Victoria Preston (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Deconstructing Art History, Constructing Visual Culture
Jennifer King (Princeton University)
Painting and Sculpture at MoMA 1929–98: Michael Asher’s catalogue of deaccessions
Nicky Ryan (University of the Arts, London)
Spaghetti-straps and ‘Crotch-Rockets’: getting inclusive at the Guggenheim