Date Night

One day while reading some dense, theoretical Museum Studies text by an author who had pretty staunch, old-fashioned views, I was reminded of another theorist who had expressed similarly ardent principles. My idiosyncratic, wandering brain imagined them having a conversation with each other, nodding enthusiastically in agreement, patting each other on the back and eventually high-fiving over their intellectual commonalities. This progressed into a scene reminiscent of a romantic comedy where the two main characters share a revelation: that they are made for each other!-- only in this case, it's based on say, a shared conviction that museums should avoid blockbuster exhibitions.  For this post, I've decided to share the top 3 Museum Studies theorist couples who were "made for each other" based on their theoretical stances. I've selected a quote from each that illustrates the reasoning behind their pairings.

The first couple: Danielle Rice and Charles W. Haxthausen. Haxthausen has put together an entire book on the separation of art history in museum and academic settings. In the introduction, he writes,

"On the one side is the perception that university-based art history has ceased to be interested in the aesthetic dimensions of the art object; if there is a love of art to be found there, it has become a love that dares not speak its name, at least not in the halls of academe. On the other hand is the view that museums have become part of the entertainment industry, that the social, economic and political conditions of museum work, the unrelenting quest for money and audiences, make serious, critical scholarship an impossibility."

 Similarly, in Rice's article, "Museums: Theory Practice and Illusion," Rice states,

"...Although the past two decades have seen a substantial increase in museological theory, the relationship between theory and practice is irrelevant to most theorists who see museums primarily as ideological symbols of the power relationships in today's culture. On the other hand, while it is not entirely ignorant of theory, most museum practice is too deeply rooted in the politics of competing interests to respond to the structural issues discussed in theoretical literature." 

It sounds like these two have a lot to talk about.

Our next power couple is Hilton Kramer and Lynne Munson. These two are both pretty old-fashioned in their writings and evoke tones that could at times be classified as crotchety. Kramer writes,

"We did not look to the art museum for news, but on the contrary, for what remained vital and enduring after it had ceased to be news. Nowadays, however, we expect of our museums that they will be dynamic rather than stable, that they will no longer be guided by fixed standards or revered traditions, but just the reverse-- that they will shed convention, defy precedent, and shatter established values often and eagerly as the most incendiary avant-gardism of yesteryear."

And Lynne Munson postulates,

"In recent years art museums have begun to resemble other kinds of institutions. Some have blurred their mission with that of trendy galleries, showing work fresh from the artists' studio before history has had a chance to determine its significance. Many museums are beginning to mimic entertainment arenas, converting much of their exhibition space into slick halls designed to excite the masses with blockbuster shows that promote artists like movie stars."

Perhaps these two will snuggle up to each other at Dumbarton Oaks or the National Gallery.

Last but not least, here are your Museum Studies king and queen, John Cotton Dana and Carol Duncan. Both of these notable theorists explored the museum experience with special attention on building structure.
Dana, a pioneer in the field, asserts,

"A building of steel and concrete in a modern American city is not made an appropriate home of the fine art by placing on its front the facade of one or the facades of half a dozen Greek temples or of 15th century Italian palaces. It is impossible to believe that the best Greek architects, if they were the masters in good taste we suppose them to have been, would have continued to make their buildings look as though they were built of columns of stone, with huge girders and crossbeams of the same material, long after they had learned to use steel and concrete in construction."

And Duncan posits,

"Art museums have always been compared to older ceremonial monuments such as palaces or temples. Indeed, from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, they were deliberately designed to resemble them. One might object that this borrowing from the architectural past can have only metaphoric meaning and should not be taken for more, since ours is a secular society and museums are secular inventions. If museum facades have imitated temples or palaces, is it not simply that modern taste has tried to emulate the formal balance and dignity of those structures, or that it has wished to associate the power of bygone faiths with the present cult of art?"

Hmm, curated couples. This could go somewhere.