Encountering Pacific Art

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Museums and Philosophy--Of Art, and Many Other Things. Part 2.

This two-part article examines the very limited engagement by philosophers with museums, and proposes analysis under six headings: cultural variety, taxonomy, and epistemology in Part I, and teleology, ethics, and therapeutics and aesthetics in Part II. The article establishes that fundamental categories of museums established in the 19th century – of art, of anthropology, of history, of natural history, of science and technology – still persist. Among them, it distinguishes between hegemonic (predominantly Western) and subaltern (minority or Indigenous) museums worldwide. It argues that relations between hegemonic and subaltern museums are often agonistic, and are compromised by claims of universalism on the part of proponents of the former. The article observes that most discussion of museums focuses exclusively and misleadingly on their public exhibition function, and contends that scholarship – not exhibition – is central to all museums. However, that predominantly taxonomic scholarship, while innovative and central to a dominant epistemology based on the observation of tangible things in the 19th century, was compromised by the epistemic shift to abstraction and experimentation in the 20th, which resulted in a loss of initiative and authority. Although epistemological changes currently in progress favor a renewed attention to tangible things as complex matrices to which museums ought to contribute significantly, the fundamental taxonomy of museums by collection type is a clog on the ability of museum scholars to engage with and themselves produce big ideas. In order to function well as sites of scholarship in the future, museums will have to be far more adaptable and attentive to a wider range of things and ideas (including Indigenous ideas incompatible with Western assumptions) than their existing collection divisions permit. Museums and philosophy do not seem readily to go together. Few philosophers have attended seriously to museums, and few museum scholars have explored philosophical issues. Philosophers have only occasionally set foot in museums in such a way as to leave a trace. In 1990, Jacques Derrida curated the exhibition Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines (“Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins”) from the holdings of the Department of Graphic Arts of the Musée du Louvre. It was the first in a series entitled Parti pris (“Taking Sides”) organized by curator Régis Michel, but the only one by a philosopher.1 Even so, Derrida’s focus was the blind, visionaries, and the European mythical foundation of drawing, not the museum or museums as such. In “Museums and Philosophy – Of Art, and Many Other Things Part I,” I broached the issue of why philosophy and museums should have so little to do with each other, avoiding one another even when scholars from each institution, such as Derrida and Michel, chose to work together closely. I suggested that perhaps in the 19th century museums were too self-evidently sites of scholarship to attract philosophical attention, whereas in the 20th and beyond their precipitate fall from epistemological grace has rendered them irrelevant. Among museum scholars, devotion to a governing discipline from among an A to Z of appropriate fields – from anthropology to zoology – has precluded any serious involvement with philosophy in all but a very few cases. I explored these matters, and why philosophers might have good reason to engage with museums, under three headings: Cultural Variety, Taxonomy, and Epistemology; and continue the exploration here under a further three: Teleology, Ethics, and Therapeutics and Aesthetics.Histor

Jesus Christ as the Divine Mercy by Eugeniusz Kazimirowski: The Most Influential Polish Painting of the Twentieth Century?

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In Search of Christian Miraculous Images in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Beyond

Histor

Display

The display of religious objects takes many forms. While sculpture on the exterior of religious buildings is visible for the long term, relics, cult images, and masquerades are shown only occasionally. One way of emphasizing the potency of an object is to reveal it infrequently. In many religious systems display is restricted, for some things are dangerous to inappropriate viewers, while others are too powerful to be seen by anyone. When access is possible, viewers value intimate encounter, usually drawing as close as possible to sacred objects. Some are small enough to be worn as amulets close to the body. On ceremonial occasions, such as processions or masquerades, devotees may compete for the privilege of carrying sacred objects. Access is usually hierarchically privileged or controlled. Those with hieratic functions—priests, elders, shamans, vow-makers, museum curators—usually enjoy the most intimate access to sacred materials, whether displayed or concealed. Priests often have exclusive access to parts of a sacred structure containing numinous materials, and museum donors pay for the privilege of exhibition tours with curators during closed hours. Intimacy of access signals status, and display reinforces social distinctions and hierarchies. However, to reduce the display of sacred material to this function alone would be misleading. The three case studies that follow—all set in Trafalgar Square, London—illustrate the variety of associations that sacred objects can have, even when displayed within yards of each other.Histor

A Role for Empathy in Decolonizing Aesthetics: Unlikely Lessons from Roger Fry

Artist and art historian Roger Fry used Paul Gauguin’s 1896 painting, Poèmes barbares, to advertise his 1910 exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists. In Vision and Design (1920), Fry promoted the so-called “primitive” art of Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa as depending on unmediated perception that he associated with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Although Fry’s assumption of an “ultra-primitive directness of vision” on the part of African makers ignores their own mediating conventions, his reliance on the Vischers’ notion of empathetic connection enhances the possibility of regarding the cultural products of peoples foreign to the percipient with what Paul C. Taylor terms an “ethical attentiveness that combats reductionism and objectification.” Further, such a form of attention can displace attempts to privilege European and Eurocentric art and thought, by referring to “primitive” art and thought, promoting recognition of their value in their own right

Spilt Ink: Aesthetic Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Art

In response to globalization, is there to be a single, homogeneous set of aesthetic values governing the production and consumption of art? The article focuses on a newcomer to globalized contemporary art, China. It suggests that artworld art (encompassed by the artworld institutions of commerce, museums, and the academy) is far from the only art currently produced. Art beyond the artworld, whether commercial or religious, is important to many people worldwide. It describes four kinds of art currently made in China. Three are artworld art (Modernist, traditional, and avantHgarde), one is non-artworld (mass commercial). Connections exist among them. Further, it argues that practices in all four conform to expectations globally that Chinese art of all kinds should exemplify imitation, emulation, and copying. Such conformity entails what Winnie Wong has termed ‘staging Chineseness’. The article concludes with an examination of this process in two recent exhibitions before proposing that a proliferation of a variety of values is unavoidable while contemporary artworld practitioners continue to introduce local concerns, and while the self-claimed high status of artworld art is progressively challenged by the vitality worldwide of non-artworld art. While some of these values are resistant to Western globalizing homogenization, others conform to it.Histor

The Riddle of a Riddle

This paper examines the distinction made by Arthur C. Danto between artworks and what he terms mere real things. It presents an eighteenth-century tool for sifting grain (a riddle) as a case study in the contexts of first, the house of its first known owner, General Artemas Ward (1727-1800); second, an exhibitioin 2006-7 drawn from the contents of that house pointedly held in an art museum; and, third, the likely maker of the object, a member of Hassanimisco Band of Nipmuc Indians. It examines the equivocal position of objects such as this in Danto\u27s estimation, things that he considers to be under contest, and asks whether the distinction between artworks and mere real things has any pertinence when artifacts can be used or regarded so variously in the course of their existence, whether as tools, symbols, artworks, or living beings

Charles LeDray

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The status of the energy calibration, polarization and monochromatization of the FCC-ee

The Future Circular electron-positron Collider, FCC- ee, is designed for unprecedented precision for particle physics experiments from the Z-pole up to above the top-pair-threshold, corresponding to a beam energy range from 45.6 to 182.5 GeV. Performing collisions at various particle-physics resonances requires precise knowledge of the centre-of-mass energy (ECM) and collision boosts at all four interaction points. Measurement of the ECM by resonant depolarization of transversely polarized pilot bunches in combination with a 3D polarimeter, aims to achieve a systematic uncertainty of 4 and 100 keV for the Z-pole and W-pair-threshold energies respectively. The ECM itself depends on the RF-cavity locations, beamstrahlung, longitudinal impedance, the Earth’s tides, opposite sign dispersion and possible collision offsets. Application of monochromatization schemes are envisaged at certain beam energies to reduce the energy spread. The latest results of studies of the energy calibration, polarization and monochromatization are reported here