Museums: a Critical Introduction

Grand, often neo-classical in style (like secular temples reserved for select works of art), museums seek to impose on the visitor a feeling of awe. Here, in a timeless setting, historical artifacts and artworks are displayed and made visible—and instructive: about the history and progress of human creative endeavor. Yet what remains invisible is the history of the museum itself. That is to say, the political, financial, scientific, and cultural forces that have produced the modern institutional museum and its ideological orientation. How did the museum become the authoritative space in which to engage with art, culture, and history? What point of view does the museum impose? And how does it shape how we think about not simply the objects on display, but also the relationship between past and present, “East” and “West,” and culture and knowledge?

In this course, an introduction to museum studies, we will train a spotlight on the web of relations that connect museums, objects, artists, academics, politicians, and corporations, in order to understand the historical emergence of museums and their institutional role in preserving, interpreting, and regulating culture. Is the museum truly universal? Is its role necessary? We’ll examine political and ethical problems in museology, including questions of repatriation, colonialism, curatorial authority, and display. And we will ask what it would mean to rethink the museum’s foundational categories—“universalism,” “masterpiece,” “public”—as well as to develop alternative models of collection, preservation, and presentation. Our aim is to develop the critical vocabulary to engage with the museum as an institution—as an historically situated, politically consequential, and ethically demanding cultural facility. Readings will be drawn from works by Susan M. Pearce, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Baxandall, Sharon Macdonald, Carol Duncan, Frederick N. Bohrer, Donald Preziosi, and Orhan Pamuk, among others.