The divided house of the American art museum

Daedalus

Volumn 128, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 33-56

  Harris, Neil ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 30444433635     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. As quoted in Jane Lusaka and John Strand, "The Boom - And What To Do About It," Museum News 77 (November/December 1998): 57. The article brings together some of the statistical support for the notion of a "Golden Age" of museums.
2. See, for example, the series of articles published in a special section of the New York Times ("Museums," New York Times, 21 April 1999) for evidence of the art museum's transforming urban influence.
3. Among a raft of recent analyses see Julie Connelly, "The Impressionists Sure Move the Merchandise," New York Times, 21 April 1999, D2.
4. This is not to argue, of course, that serious intellectual ambitions and activities are new to the American museum. For one recent study arguing the case for the centrality of museums in the epistemology of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, see Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
5. For admiring European comments on American museums see, for example, the observations of Sir Henry Miers quoted in the New York Times, 27 May 1928, 6.
6. For such critiques, some from inside the art-museum community, see Henry W. Kent, "Museums of Art," Architectural Forum 47 (December 1927): 584;
7. Fiske Kimball, "Museum Values," American Magazine of Art 19 (September 1928): 480;
8. and Forest H. Cooke, "Culture and Fatigue: Some Reflections on Museums," Century 111 (January 1926): 291-296.
9. This was Julius Langbehm in Rembrandt als Erzieher, as quoted in Benjamin Ives Gilman, Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method (Cambridge: Riverside Press and Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1918).
10. Mary Bronson Hartt, "Docentry: A New Profession," Outlook 94 (January-April 1910): 708.
11. Benjamin Ives Gilman, "Docent Service at the Boston Art Museum," Nation 91 (1 September 1910): 197.
12. These were the comments of Kenyon Cox in Stockton Axson, Kenyon Cox, G. Stanley Hall, and Oliver S. Tonks, eds., Art Museums and Schools: Four Lectures Delivered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Scribner's, 1913), 70.
13. Elizabeth Luther Cary, "Modern Attitudes of Our Museums," New York Times, 17 December 1933, ix, 12.
14. Grant Code, Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 22 (April 1935): 65.
15. See Richard F. Bach, "Neighborhood Exhibitions of the Metropolitan Museum of Art," Museum News 16 (1 September 1938): 7.
16. For more on the financial history of the New-York Historical Society see Kevin M. Guthrie, The New-York Historical Society: Lessons From One Nonprofit's Long Struggle for Survival (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), particularly chap. 4.
17. For an amusing and often ironic examination of the museum store and its authority see the essays, illustrations, and glossary in Gottfried Fliedl, Ulrich Giersch, Martin Sturm, and Rainer Zendron, eds., Wa(h)re Kunst: Der Museumshop als Wunderkammer. Theoretische Objete, Fakes und Souvenirs, Werkbund-Archiv, Bd. 26 (1997).
18. For retrospective observations by the curator, see Allon Schoener, ed., Harlem On My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968 (New York: New Press, 1995), introduction to new ed. This is a reprinting of the original catalog published in 1968 by Random House.
19. Thomas P. F. Hoving, "Branch Out!" Museum News 47 (September 1968): 19.
20. Russell Lynes, "The Pilot of the Treasure House - Mr. Hoving at the Met," Art in America 55 (July-August 1967): 24.
21. Linda Nochlin, "Museums and Radicals: A History of Emergencies," Art in America 59 (July-August 1971): 38. This issue of Art in America was a special museum issue, bringing together critiques and jeremiads reflecting the mood of the day.
22. Brian O'Doherty, "Introduction," Art in America 59 (July-August 1971): 75.
23. For some of these suggestions, and for evidence, by scholars and critics, of considerable indignation at what were perceived to be self-aggrandizing public-relations steps undertaken by the ambitious Metropolitan Museum of Art, see "The Metropolitan Museum, 1870-1970-2000," Artnews 68 (January 1970): 27-45, 58-60b. The fourteen contributors included Barnett Newman, Linda Nochlin, Harold Rosenberg, Meyer Schapiro, and Rudolf Wittkower.
24. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 85. This book was originally published in France in 1963, and in English translation in 1973.
25. Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1996), 109.
26. Donald Preziosi, "Art History, Museology, and the Staging of Modernity," in Maurice Tuchman, Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 299-300.
27. Ivan Gaskell, Art Bulletin 77 (December 1995): 675.
28. Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), ix-x.
29. For an extended critique of one contemporary museum's effort to deliver and package the facts, see Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997).
30. The "biggest problem facing art museums today" is the "emerging 'consensus' among politicians, community activities, funding sources, and engaged academics that the art museum is first and foremost a social institution, an active educational center with a mandate to encourage therapeutic social perspectives for learning about and appreciating the visual arts." James Cuno, "Money, Power and the History of Art," Art Bulletin 79 (March 1997): 7.