Contemporary art history and institutional history of museums

Socially engaged art since the 1990s has become a global trend. The practices of socially engaged arts, while creating new kinds of arts and opening up the entire institutional domain of the art world, are inseparable from the practices of museums that undertake significant changes. In this essay, I theorize the concept of “socially engaged art museum” - a practice that unveils art as an aesthetic force for rendering everyday life performative or playful - to examine both socially engaged arts and museums under what the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “aesthetic regime of art” (2009). Comparing with the current scholarship that mostly examines European and American examples, I examine cases from Chinese contemporary art. Specifically, I discuss artistic practices of the Yangdeng Art Collective in Southwestern China. My argument is that a socially engaged art museum - qualitatively different from a conventional art museum that engages social life through its curated collections and exhibitions - is both a context-specific artwork of aesthetic experience and a technology of the individualized self in contemporary risk society. Not only does this study question the common scholarly view of socially engaged arts as “post-autonomous” or “anti-aesthetic,” but it also advances a notion of sociality that accounts for the complexity of everyday life.

Cornelia Parker is a British-born, London-based artist set to show at Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art as part of this year’s Sydney International Art Series. Her works are marked by an unusual amount of order, coupled with an unusual range of emotion. This dualism ties together a variety of aesthetic forms and subjects, as Parker has historically ranged across broad, humanistic themes and mediums. Her large-scale artwork War Room will be one inclusion: a red-ceilinged, paper-draped room of punched-out, memorial-poppy-fabric conjuring soft, vulnerable womb-like organs, it stands as a testimony to the bodily destruction of state-sanctioned conflict. Her artworks have frequently been co-opted by political and environmental movements, but Parker does not like to be described as a political artist. Many of her works transcend national borders to speak to a global community: for instance, Apocalpse Later, which stems from an ecologically-centric interview with Noam Chomksy, as well as her early, now iconic installation Cold Dark Matter, comprising an exploded domestic shed and its material contents.

The diversity of her practice places a question mark over how Parker will engage with an Australian museological audience. Another early artwork, The Maybee, interrogates institutional approaches to the public display of objects and artefacts, throwing into account the manifold ways in which museums frame the taxonomic interpretation of objects and their histories. Parker’s canon is complex in its site-specificity, and this – coupled with the artist’s evident awareness of museum convention – provides a thought-provoking precursor to what may be on display.

“Museums are sometimes described as the storehouses of the human
condition. While museums can house artifacts and specimens from
across time and place, it is how these items inspire others that truly
gives them value. The same object or specimen invokes something
different in each of us. The BMS has more than 750,000 objects and
artifacts in its collection—but why these items? What can they tell us?
Why should they matter? And how does safeguarding these collections
further our understanding of the world around us? Three years in
the making, Lost Beauty II: The Art of Museum Stories will
showcase a selection of 15 items from the Museum’s vast collection.
These small fragments inspired renowned artist, Alberto Rey, and
through his paintings, he asks us to look beyond the scale, label, or
fragment and appreciate the lost beauty within.”
Kathryn H. Leacock
Deputy Director, Buffalo Museum of Science

For more information, go to: www.albertorey.com  .

Installed as an artist’s project for Melbourne Now (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 23 October 2013 – 23 March 2014), The gallery of air was a room filled with hundreds of things, each of which variously held an idea of air: from a draft excluder to an asthma inhaler; from a battery-powered ‘breathing’ dog to an old bicycle pump; from a Jacobean air stem glass to a Salvador Dalí ashtray made for Air India; from a John Constable cloud study to a Goya print of a farting figure. The gallery of air was a diorama of gallery things and my things.
Ninety-two things from the vast array of objects in the NGV’s collection were mixed with 287 of my things – with all objects selected specifically because they held some idea of air. Here a Wedgwood vase decorated with flute players found itself alongside a record by Curved Air; there a blown glass orb with a single air bubble, the breath of its maker, caught forever inside, found itself next to a blow dryer. I simply wanted to put the collection to work in a different way. By selecting these things according to an apparently arbitrary and poetic category, the way we read them was temporarily reset. I was worried that the Gallery’s things might not be as interesting as mine, but luckily they seemed to hold their own.
After giving a talk to the NGV Women’s Association about the upcoming installation of The gallery of air, I was flattered to be asked to write this article, expanding on that address. Having said this, I must also say that agreeing to do so was a bit like telling someone that you’re a comedian, then immediately being asked if you know any jokes. At the risk of explaining my jokes, here I intend to simply unpack The gallery of air and the ideas running through it as frankly as I can.

RESUMO: A diligente marca grafiteira Banksy, que circunscreve os muros do globo desde meados da década passada, está na lanterna da diáspora artística de sua geração: exposições com residência nas potencialidades, exposições com residência na volta ao mundo – em ambos os sentidos. No paradoxo, esse heterônimo retém e preserva anonimamente a autoria (individual ou coletiva) e alcança repercussão mundial e aprovação popular novidadeiras para a arte urbana. Alcança também inserção: ainda maior ineditismo encontra-se na proposta coextensiva que Banksy hoje melhor representa entre os espaços expositivos intramuros e extramuros, tradicionalmente avessos entre si. Uma pendularidade para a qual os artistas de rua se apresentam cada vez mais aptos e eticamente harmonizados, selando a reorientação do contracultural mesmo dentro da contemporaneidade, e selando ainda mais a decantação da cizânia, da segregação mútua entre o institucional e o periférico: relevam-se contrariedades aparentemente terminais e revelam-se acessos de uns para os outros.

ABSTRACT: The diligent graffiti tag Banksy, which bounds globe walls since the middles of last decade, is in the flashlight of its generation’s artistic Diaspora: exhibitions dwelling in the potentialities, exhibitions dwelling in the run around the world – in both meanings. In the paradox, that pen name anonymously retains and preserves the authorship (individual or collective) and reaches world repercussion and popular approval faddist for the urban art. It also reaches insertion: even larger novelty is in the coextensive proposal which Banksy today best represents between the intramurally and extramurally expositive spaces, traditionally conversed between each other. An oscillation on which street artists present themselves more and more capable and ethically harmonized, sealing the contra-cultural reorientation even inside contemporaneity itself, and even more the decantation of the darnel, the mutual segregation between the institutional and the peripheral: annoyances seemingly terminal are exempted and accesses are revealed to one another.

Essay for the catalogue "Art in Battle" at KODE in Bergen, Norway. The exhibition examines the Norwegian art world during the German occupation during the Second World War. This essay provides context by looking at the case of one German painter, and suggesting the implications of that case for the discipline of art history and its institutions in general.

During the past two decades the visitation rates of United States museums has been declining. There are three main museums in the United States: Art museums, Natural History museums, and Science museums. All three of these categories cater to their own unique demographics of visitors. New technologies, such as a virtual tour guide or a more interactive exhibits, have been added to try to bring in visitors at all of these museums. This research examined the effects of socioeconomic status, marital status, and number of children on the annual visitation rates of these museums. The data was obtained from the 2012 wave of the General Social Survey. The sample size was 833 respondents. Results from a bivariate correlation of all three museum visitation questions and socioeconomic status (SES) suggest that those with a higher SES visit museums more frequently than those with a lower SES. This supports the hypothesis that SES has a large impact on frequency of museum visitation.

À travers une étude de cas de chacune des formes de délocalisation du musée du Louvre et du Centre Pompidou, sur le territoire français, en Europe, puis dans le monde, les stratégies de rayonnement de ces deux institutions nationales sont analysées par le recours à une approche comparative. L’expansionnisme territorial des deux établissements phares du paysage muséal parisien se caractérise par la valorisation de leur nom de marque, de leurs collections et de leur savoir-faire, qui est abordé en regard d’une pratique qualifiée de « franchise muséale ». Ainsi, le « musée franchisé » - déterminé par l’essaimage de l’institution mère détentrice d’actifs matériels et immatériels valorisables à l’étranger - permet de questionner le devenir des deux musées et, dans une perspective plus large, d’envisager quel sera le musée de demain.

한마디로 오늘날 현대미술은 보통 사람들이 생각하는 것보다 훨씬 광범위하고 막강한 사회 권력 차원에서, 일반적 삶의 규모로는 감히 상상조차 힘든 자본과 현실 정치경제비즈니스 역학을 작동시키며 성장하고 있다. 더 정확히 말해, 이 같은 현실 사례는 현대미술이 국가나 민족은 문제도 아니고, 미학적/정치적 이념 또는 역사적 사회적 기반에도 크게 구애받지 않고, 이를테면 국경을 넘고 규제를 따돌리면서 시공간적 맥락으로부터 거의 완전히 자유로운 상태로 전개되고 있음을 보여준다. 하지만 완전히 비대칭으로, 보이지 않는 실세들의 뜻에 따라, 공익적 가치와 의미보다는 배타적 이익과 효과를 위해.
깊숙이 알고 보면 몇 몇의 압도적 강자를 중심으로, 몇 몇 우세한 예술 비즈니스의 전략과 모델이 세계를 장악하고 가시적/비가시적 위세를 떨치고 있는 장이 바로 현대미술분야다. 여기서는 무시 못 할 규모의 예산이 집행되거나 천문학적 규모의 자금 거래가 이뤄지고, 국가 또는 도시의 정치경제적 지원 혹은 ‘초국정운영술(extrastatecraft)’ Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, Verso, 2014. 각 국가의 주권이 중첩되거나 교환되는 국지에서 사법권 등 관할권을 넘어/면제시켜 운영하는 체제. 가령 자유무역도시, 면세지대, 자유무역항 등.
에 따른 규제 자유가 당연한 것처럼 요구되고 수용된다. 하지만 사실 그 안에는 자원봉사자부터 전시팀 말단 스태프에 이르기까지 수많은 익명들의 노동과 희생이, 관객의 겸손한 참여와 인내어린 지지가 기반이 돼 있다. 그리고 문화예술의 전통적 가치를 존중하면서 관련 제도 및 시스템에 대해 특수한 법적/경제적 혜택을 인정해온 시민사회의 진보적 의식이 담보로 잡혀있다.
  그럼에도 불구하고 현대미술 판에서 ‘책임’이라는 것이 거의 또는 전혀 존재하지 않는다는 사실은 크나큰 역설이다. 계약 기간이 끝나면 비엔날레 감독, 미술관 관장, 커미셔너, 큐레이터들은 짐을 싸서(실패했든 성공했든 경력이라는 특산품을 챙겨들고) 다른 일을 찾아 철새처럼 떠나면 그만이다.

From Paper Monument, editors:
In light of recent political shifts across the globe, have you sensed a change in the position of the art institution vis-à-vis political activism? Can an art institution go from being an object of critique to a site for organizing?
How? Should the art institution play this kind of role? What other roles can or should it play? What other institutions, curators, or publics do you look to in formulating your own institution’s position?
Recent controversies over curatorial choices have foregrounded the different ways in which institutions envision their audience(s). In your experience, is this process changing? How should it proceed? How can an institution address the dichotomy between art as cultural entertainment
and art as political inquiry? What is the role of the curator in mediating this? How does this compare to the artist’s role? How can art institutions be better?

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY:
Regine Basha
Chloë Bass
Dena Beard
Zachary Cahill
Ken Chen
Lori Cole
Anne Ellegood
Anthony Elms
Deborah Fisher
Zanna Gilbert
Namita Gupta Wiggers
Larissa Harris
Pablo Helguera
Megan Heuer
Kemi Ilesanmi
Mary Jane Jacob
Alhena Katsof
Kristan Kennedy
Alex Klein
Jordan Martins
Amanda Parmer
Risa Puleo
Laura Raicovich
Sara Reisman
Chris Reitz
Nicolás Rodríguez Melo
Stephen Squibb
Elizabeth Thomas
Gilbert Vicario
Anuradha Vikram

Os museus, tanto no Brasil quanto no mundo, vêm sendo parte do jogo milionário do mercado de arte, mesmo sendo algo completamente contrário ao que diz o código de ética e demais normas do estatuto. Será que isso é realmente um problema? Arte contemporânea e o posicionamento atual das instituições museológicas são postos em cheque através da análise de diversos especialistas da área. É feito também uma breve análise de um dos mais polêmicos artistas contemporâneos e o seu relacionamento com os museus: Romero Britto.

A text about the museum in the abstract and the Van Abbemuseum in concrete terms. Looking at what possibility for action and self-organisation exists for funded art institutions and how they may be realised in one particular case in the Netherlands

This article seeks to identify impediments to, as well as opportunities for, change in American art museums in the face of demands for social justice and greater inclusivity. Focusing specifically on the representation of American art in wellestablished encyclopaedic museums, I argue that inherited collections and taxonomies, mapped onto the physical spaces of museums, limit the speed and degree to which aesthetic priorities, values and narratives may adapt in order to meet shifting demographics and visitor expectations. In effect, the challenge for many museums is to confront and navigate an institutionalized form of white supremacy baked into their intellectual and material foundations. I end by analysing several recent strategies that have aimed at dismantling conventions and complicating the canon. Across the museum world in the United States, the year 2020 will be remembered for the deleterious impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the emancipatory force of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), forcing an overdue reckoning with how pre-eminent cultural institutions can foster a more diverse and inclusive workforce, environment, public face and message. On the far side of the pandemic, museums-those that survive the economic impact of COVID-will no doubt have issues of social justice, equity, diversity and

Texto publicado en el libro  "Museología Crítica: temas selectos. Reflexiones desde la Cátedra William Bulock", por el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura y el MUAC, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2019.

Text published in  "Critical Museology: selected themes. Reflections from the William Bullock Lecture Series", by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura and MUAC, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2019.

Libro completo / full book: https://muac.unam.mx/publicacion/museologia-critica-temas-selectos

The appearance of textiles, which by common perception is their main attribute, is shaped by many different factors, such as the raw material, ornamentation and structure, both as an external form and a manner of connecting fibers and other elements of textiles. It is not always realised by contemporary artists and designers that the same factors also determine the durability, conservation and storage methods. The paper briefly describes the main factors constituting textiles,  showing how important the awareness of their  role is to all who deal with textiles, from artists and designers, conservators and critics, to visitors to a gallery and museum exhibitions. It also shows that historical textiles, contemporary textile art and industrial textile products only appear to constitute separate independent worlds and in fact influence each other

Art museum professionals are required to 'believe in art' in order to do their jobs. Sustaining this belief in art is an essential component of what secures the 'art-museumness' of art museums. Art museums may have evolved and diversified in the past few decades, becoming more hybrid institutions where a more diverse range of activities is allowed to take place, but what has not changed is the centrality of works of art as objects of dedicated contemplation within these spaces.  In this essay, I argue that their very status and identity as“art museum”sets limits to what art museums can do to change in their efforts to democratise themselves. Through a case study of two prominent art museums in Sydney, Australia, I show that such efforts are likely to be blunted when the very art-museumness of a particular museum is problematized.

Media, New Media, Postmedia è stato scritto tra il 2008 e il 2010, per aiutare prima di tutto me stesso, l'autore, a venire a capo di quello strano conflitto tra mondi dell'arte di cui facevo, e faccio tutt'oggi esperienza quotidianamente, nel mio lavoro di docente, critico e curatore; per metterne a fuoco e spiegarne le dinamiche e le motivazioni profonde, per studiarne e illustrarne gli sviluppi storici, e per indicare una via d'uscita possibile. I mondi dell'arte a cui faccio riferimento sono il mondo dell'arte contemporanea "mainstream", con la sua popolazione di artisti e professionisti e il suo paesaggio di musei, gallerie, biennali, premi, fiere, riviste; e il mondo della cosiddetta New Media Art, messo a punto tra gli anni Sessanta e gli anni Novanta del Novecento per ospitare, sostenere, nutrire, discutere, valorizzare e conservare la sperimentazione artistica con le nuove tecnologie in una fase storica in cui queste ricerche erano, con poche eccezioni, ignorate dal mondo dell'arte. Il conflitto è, ovviamente, quello relativo al posizionamento di queste pratiche artistiche, in un momento - la svolta di Millennio - in cui, complice l'esplosione della rivoluzione digitale, il mondo dell'arte ha cominciato finalmente a riconoscerne la rilevanza e l'urgenza culturale.

In Domenico Quaranta, Media, New Media, Postmedia, Postmedia Books, Milano 2018. Seconda edizione

Lecture delivered at The Feminist Art Project, 2013 College Art Association panel, "Queering the Museum" organized by Tirza Latimer. Sections of this subsequently republished in "Contemporary Art and Critical Transgender Infrastructures" Trap Door (MIT Press and New Museum, 2017) eds. J. Burton, E. Stanley, Tourmaline.

Recording (with slides) available at https://vimeo.com/61801049

A reflection on my research and publishing approach to the field of exhibition histories, with a focus on the books I have worked on with colleagues for Afterall (one a year since 2010): https://www.afterall.org/publications/exhibition.histories/ This text was commissioned by Mia Yu for her edited section of Art Monthly (Beijing) on exhibition histories; her introduction features alongside.

This chapter assesses  the curatorial strategies, approaches and narratives of 4 exhibitions showcasing Black art of the 1980s, held in the Netherlands at the Van Abbemuseum (2016) and the UK at Nottingham Contemporary , MIMA and South London Gallery (2017). The chapter reflects on the selection of artists, art works, documentation and archives across the four iterations. It interrogates the curatorial concept of montage over the life-span of the project. Building on the pioneering research of Paul Goodwin, David Dibosa and the AHRC research project Black Artists and Modernism, directed by Professor Sonia Boyce, this chapter situates The Place is Here within recent histories of exhibitions and displays focusing on Black art of the 1980s, from Sheffield Museums in collaboration with the BLK Art Group, No Colour Bar at Guildhall Art Gallery London to Rahul Patel's archival reprise of The Devils Feast at Chelsea as well as Paul Goodwin’s initiatives at Tate Britain, including Thin Black Line(s) (co-curated by Lubaina Himid) and ‘New Diasporic Voices’, the final section of Migrations: Journeys into British Art.

This chapter explores the dynamic relationship between contemporary art and anthropology from multiple perspectives. In recent volumes specifically investigat- ing the relationship of contemporary art and anthropology, the focus is primarily on the capacities of both art and anthropology to represent social worlds,and there is surprisingly little discussion of the border zones and aesthetic frames that define contemporary art as a specific material genre and institutionalized practice.

Sápmi, the Sámi area, is transnational; it transcends four nation states, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Art and art history have been considered natural parts of a nation state’s inventory since the 19th century and have contributed to the production and maintenance of national identities and narratives. What is the role of the nation state in art history, and how has the national paradigm shaped the presentation of Sámi art, historically and today? Focusing on the discipline of art history in Norway, the volume exposes the prevailing representation of Sámi art, duodji, and dáidda as ethnographic material and relates it to the politics of nation building in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The book examines the representation of Sámi art, artefacts, practices, materialities, actors, concepts, and themes in Norwegian Art History, to uncover some of the disciplinary mechanisms and dominant narratives. The central method is historiography in combination with fieldwork in archives and museums, aimed at doing art historiography in the expanded field – to move beyond the traditional textual focus and question naturalized institutional and disciplinary boundaries. This is one of very few historiographical studies on the art historical discipline in Norway, and the first comprehensive monograph on the representation of Sámi art. How to cite this book: Grini, M. 2021. Samisk kunst og norsk kunsthistorie: Delvise forbindelser. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bbm

This thesis examines the curatorial practice of William Olander (1950–1989), a prolific curator, writer, and scholar, over a short but full period of ten years before
Olander’s death from AIDS in 1989. Olander’s work as a contemporary curator in the visual arts addressed the issues of his day as a form of criticism and even activism. Specifically, his work directly addressed and acted within a vital field of debate about the fraught aesthetics and politics of representation within the cultural discourses of postmodernism and the discourses of the politics of gender and sexual identification and of gay and queer identity after the Stonewall rebellion of 1969. This thesis explores the
exhibitions "The Art of Memory/The Loss of History," (1985), "Homo Video: Where We Are Now," (1986), and "Let The Record Show..." (1987) as a series of responses to now established ideas and issues in the field of contemporary art history and theory. This thesis seeks to
reinstate Olander as a fearless participant in the complex political reality of the eighties and as a voice that can inform curatorial practice today.

Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy makers and creative entrepreneurs. Building on the legacy of events that conjoin art, critical theory and counterculture, from Nova Convention to documenta X, the new biennial blends the modalities of protest with a neoliberal politics of creativity.

This book examines a strained period for these high art institutions, a period when their politics are brought into question and often boycotted in the context of austerity, crisis and the rise of Occupy cultures. Using the 3rd Athens Biennale and the 7th Berlin Biennale as its main case studies, it looks at how the in-built tensions between the domains of art and politics take shape when spectacular displays attempt to operate as immediate activist sites. Drawing on ethnographic research and contemporary cultural theory, this book argues that biennials both denunciate the aesthetic as bourgeois category and simultaneously replicate and diffuse an exclusive sociability across social landscapes.

This article describes, on the one hand, key conduits between open fascists and the current US administration, and, on the other, the ties of major arts philanthropists to this administration. It reveals the common agendas of the patron class and a liberal world view that hopes to represent the middle class (or the petty bourgeoisie), and that purports (but fails) to serve the working classes. Historians of twentieth-century fascism have repeatedly shown how fascist takeover of state power was dependent on the complicity of groups and classes that were not otherwise fascist. In light of this and several works of contemporary anti-fascist analysis, it raises the spectre of neo-fascism as a real danger against which to measure present events. I argue that the liberal quest for a so-called civil debate, instead of community militancy, and which is prevalent in the artworld, misplaces the real site of struggle, which is the alliance of neo-fascism with capitalist interest.

Photographic reproductions have made images of art, rather than actual works of art, the primary means of art consumption. This paper considers photography as a tool for official and personal memory through the specific genre of the art reproduction, drawing from established theories of photography including seminal works by Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and John Berger, as well as recent and contemporary sources that consider current technologies and the effects of social media and digital photography. The concept of tourism provides an important focus for this discussion because the tourist is so deeply associated with the camera, which can provide a method of structuring experiences in foreign environments and also produces images that memorialize, and come to define, experience. The tourist is also connected to the commercialism of art museums, which increasingly operate as tourist sights with cafés, shops, and complex digital platforms. These are popular strategies for increasing visitor numbers and revenue, and such programs are rationalized as strategies for appealing to new audiences and for welcoming the “uninitiated” lay public to the elite space of the art museum. These strategies, however, appease rather than appeal, and may ultimately limit possibilities for deep engagement across the varied museum public. Museums may be necessitated to play the game of commercialism for fiscal viability, but this should not delimit the visitor experience, which should include the direct experience of material works of art.

"Zürich hat sich nicht eine Gewehrpatrone, sondern eine Kanonenkugel in den Fuss geschossen": So kommentiert das Westschweizer Wirtschaftsmagazin «bilan» den Bührle-Skandal in Zürich. Tatsächlich endete die Kommunikationsstrategie von Stadt und Kanton Zürich mit einem Fiasko. Als im August 2018 eine Studie zur Geschichte des «Kanonenkönigs» und seiner Kunstkäufe in Auftrag gegeben wurde, hiess es noch, die Limmatstadt wolle «ein international vorbildhaftes Projekt zum Umgang mit einer politisch 'belasteten' Kunstsammlung (...) präsentieren» (Zitat aus dem Projektauftrag). Das urbane Standortmarketing hatte vor, die Limmatstadt mit einer hochkarätigen Sammlung in die globale Spitzenliga der Museen zu katapultieren, wurde jedoch in flagranti von der düsteren Geschichte Bührles eingeholt. Der in der "Friedenszeitung" (Nr. 39, Dezember 2021) erschienene Artikel analysiert die Dynamik des Skandals und verortet das Problem, das Zürich mit der Bührle-Sammlung hat, in einem nationalen und internationalen Kontext.

Il "Catalogo degli oggetti di sommo pregio per la storia e per l’arte appartenenti a privati" (1903) riporta per la Puglia la sola collezione Jatta. In realtà, valutando le modalità di formazione del Museo Provinciale già in Palazzo Ateneo a Bari è possibile cogliere una dimensione altra che, mutuando anche il "Piano" (1808) del salentino Michele Arditi, ha comportato il passaggio da un’idea di collezionismo di tipo più edonistico e ad alto rischio di dispersione ereditaria a una declinazione illuminista di museo all’insegna della pubblica utilità.

. in "Camillo d’Errico (1821-1897) e le rotte mediterranee del collezionismo ottocentesco", Giornate internazionali di studio a cura di E. Acanfora, M. Fontana (Palazzo San Gervasio-Matera, 10-11 novembre 2016)

This is the co-authored introduction to 'Art and its Worlds: Exhibitions, Institutions and Art Becoming Public' (2021) – the 12th title in Afterall's 'Exhibition Histories' series of books. It reflects on the 15-year research project that has produced this series. It also guides readers to the content of the book, which offers a possible history of art since 1989 told through the moments when art becomes public. The anthology addresses some of the myriad worlds conjured by art and the telling of their histories. It is guided by three questions: What is the 'global' for art and exhibition-making, or why has it been what it has? How have agents including artists and curators experimented with different forms of exhibition? And how do these exhibitionary moments connect to longerterm and institutional trajectories? Key texts previously published in Afterall journal appear alongside newly commissioned essays, artist contributions, conversations and translations, exploring exhibition as a material, embodied and political practice, while inviting a new location for past art and bringing it into the present for what is to come.

A critical analysis of contemporary art collections and the value form, this book shows why the nonprofit system is unfit to administer our common collections, and offers solutions for diversity reform and redistributive restructuring.

In the United States, institutions administered by the nonprofit system have an ambiguous status as they are neither entirely private nor fully public. Among nonprofits, the museum is unique as it is the only institution where trustees tend to collect the same objects they hold in “public trust” on behalf of the nation, if not humanity. The public serves as alibi for establishing the symbolic value of art, which sustains its monetary value and its markets.

This structure allows for wealthy individuals at the helm to gain financial benefits from, and ideological control over, what is at its core purpose a public system. The dramatic growth of the art market and the development of financial tools based on art-collateral loans exacerbate the contradiction between the needs of museum leadership versus that of the public. Indeed, a history of private support in the US is a history of racist discrimination, and the common collections reflect this fact.

A history of how private collections were turned public gives context. Since the late Renaissance, private collections legitimized the prince's right to rule, and later, with the great revolutions, display consolidated national identity. But the rise of the American museum reversed this and re-privatized the public collection. A materialist description of the museum as a model institution of the liberal nation state reveals constellations of imperialist social relations.

This article examines some significant yet little-known early anthropological achievements in Italy. These include the world's first museum of anthropology, founded in 1869 by Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910) at Florence (Firenze), Italy, where that same year he also established Italy's (and the world's) first "cattedra" (university professorship) of anthropology. Mantegazza sought to develop a unified "science of man," with a broad definition of the new discipline that brought together human physiological, ethnographic, and "comparative psychology" collections within his new anthropology museum, later complemented by a companion "psychological" museum. Even though Mantegazza's Florentine school of anthropology ended under Fascism, today the surviving Museum of Anthropology in Florence is still the repository of important ethnographic collections from early Italian traveler-explorers and other contributors. Their study was an important component of Mantegazza's science, which is receiving new attention by modern Italian anthropologists.

This chapter contribution -- co-written with Catherine Wood, Senior Curator of International Art (Performance) at Tate Modern -- reviews the history of performance in museums. We argue against the dual notions that performance's appearance in the museum is a new (21st-century) phenomenon and that this "institutionalization" somehow denatures or voids artworks. Instead, we demonstrate that performance has been entwined with museums since at least the 1960s as part of artists' and institutions' explorations into the social relevance of art and what it means to build a relationship with an audience.

PhD thesis / University of Amsterdam / Faculty of Humanities (FGw) / Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory Studies (AHM)

Contemporary art challenges the traditional idea of a musealium as well as institutional procedures related to collection care and preservation. Conventionally, visual artworks have been perceived as fixed, unique, material entities created and finished at a particular time, and museum approaches to collecting and preserving them were established accordingly. Nevertheless, contemporary art often resists this definition and undermines dogmas of material authenticity and artist’s intent, as well as the conviction that an object’s integrity resides in its physical features. Taking as its focus the triangle of relationships between an artist, a museum and a contemporary artwork as collectible, this study investigates how contemporary artworks by Mirosław Bałka, Danh Vo and Barbara Kruger are collected, documented and conserved in today’s institutions. It looks at how (and whether) new methods developed in the field of contemporary art conservation, such as the artist’s interview, are adopted by museums, and attempts to identify factors undermining their effectiveness. By looking at contemporary art as a new paradigm of artistic practice and building on notions such as musealisation, art project as art form and art object as document, this study works towards a theoretical model that address the incompatibility between a traditional museum approach to collecting and preserving and the features of contemporary art. By employing and extending concepts introduced by conservation theorist Hanna Hölling and the notion of ‘anarchives’ by media theorist Siegfried Zielinski, this study adopts the model of the ‘artwork-as-(an)archive’. Starting from the premise that our future understanding of contemporary artworks can only be constructed through traces of documentation, this model grants documents a status equal to that of art objects and obliges institutions to care for them on a similar basis. Besides its capacity to facilitate conservation, the artwork-as-(an)archive model is here considered as a space for collaboration between artists and museums, a space to be collectively shaped, filled and nourished that fosters transparency and inclusiveness.

This paper explores ideas of the utopian in relation to art museums and the contemporary moment in the Arabian Peninsula. The transference of global art museums – art museums constructed according to dominant western art historical principles and museological practices – to the Arabian Peninsula has brought with it the rhetoric of post-Enlightenment depoliticized humanist idealism that argues for the ability of these museums to instrumentalize international peace and understanding, as well as offering solace on an individual level through solitary communion with works of art, resulting in a transcendental experience. The discussion addresses the differing ideologies at play and concludes by evaluating some of the futures posited for global art museums in the Arabian Peninsula.