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From: George Vasey Category: Art Date: 31 July 2006 Time: 03:22 PM Review: A museum is host to an incredibly complicated game, one that allows the artist to play by an endlessly adaptable set of rules. A museum quantifies culture through its own (ever-changing) theories. If artists can be seen as voyagers then curators are cartographers of aesthetic and intellectual ideas. This is all played out to wider public scrutiny as a way of increasing the public’s sensitivity to new ideas. A museum makes public what was once created for the privacy of rich people or the subservience of the church; it changes the exchange of art away from a commodity into curiosity. Museums created larger public spaces for artists to occupy, defining new roles of the artist. To paraphrase MOMA’S curator a museum should ‘make iconic work seem less familiar and marginal or new work more iconic’ generating new discourse through re-interpretations of old work. The new Joseph Beuys show at the Tate shows that the curator can become an anonymous collaborator with the artist; Beuys art relied heavily on his own charisma, the posthumous accumulation of the relic challenges the curator to display Beuys as a contemporary concern. Museums bear the fruits and scars of colonial or national history and it protects work for the benefit of academics and the wider public. MOMA acts as a public monument; it is symbiotically linked to the history of America, and specifically New York. The museums collection of European modernism articulates a subsequent history of New York’s adoption of artistic avant-garde with the abstract-expressionists. The way we read our history tells us most about our current concerns and museums enable us to do that. Museums are like umbilical cords, tying our present concerns to historical imperatives.