Museum Memories : History, Technology, Art

by Maleuvre, Didier

• ISBN13: 9780804736046
• ISBN10: 0804736049
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-04-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

From its inception in the early nineteenth century, the museum has been more than a mere historical object; it has manufactured an image of history. In collecting past artifacts, the museum gives shape and presence to history, defining the space of a ritual encounter with the past. The museum believes in history, yet it behaves as though history could be summarized and completed. By building a monument to the end of history and lifting art out of the turmoil of historical survival, the museum is said to dehistoricize the artwork. It replaces historicity with historiography, and living history turns into timelessness. This twofold process explains the paradoxical character of museums. They have been accused of being both too heavy with historical dust and too historically spotless, excessively historicizing artworks while cutting them off from the historical life in which artworks are born. Thus the museum seems contradictory because it lectures about the historical nature of its objects while denying the same objects the living historical connection about which it purports to educate. The contradictory character of museums leads the author to a philosophical reflection on history, one that reconsiders the concept of culture and the historical value of art in light of the philosophers, artists, and writers who are captivated by the museum. Together, their voices prompt a reevaluation of the concepts of historical consciousness, artistic identity, and the culture of objects in the modern period. The author shows how museum culture offers a unique vantage point on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' preoccupation with history and subjectivity, and he demonstrates how the constitution of the aesthetic provides insight into the realms of technology, industrial culture, architecture, and ethics.

Author Biography

Didier Maleuvre is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(6)
Museum Times	7	(106)
History Lab	9	(4)
Pointing Fingers	13	(4)
Authenticity	17	(4)
Hegel's Guide to the Museum	21	(9)
Art of Misplacement	30	(9)
The Art Police	39	(4)
The Origin of Museums	43	(7)
The Avant-Garde Attacks	50	(6)
Monumental Time	56	(8)
The Caesura of Art	64	(3)
The Caesura of the Image	67	(4)
Proust's Museum	71	(4)
The Experience of Art	75	(7)
Art in Ruins	82	(5)
Framework	87	(8)
The Decline of Subject	95	(7)
Estheticizing the Bourgeois	102	(5)
The Identity in Question	107	(6)
Bringing the Museum Home: The Domestic Interior in the Nineteenth-Century	113	(76)
Dwelling in the Nineteenth Century	115	(5)
How We Dwell	120	(4)
Writing the Interior	124	(9)
The Dollhouse	133	(5)
Pointillism	138	(4)
Nature morte	142	(4)
Camera Obscura	146	(5)
Interior and Interiority	151	(5)
The Interior and Its Doubles	156	(5)
Eden Indoors	161	(10)
Clues	171	(5)
Losing Touch	176	(6)
Material Life	182	(7)
Balzacana	189	(94)
Divorce Story	191	(1)
Cornucopia	192	(5)
A World of Objects	197	(5)
The Old and the New	202	(2)
``On the Quai Voltaire, in the nineteenth century''	204	(3)
The Museum-Goer	207	(6)
Taxidermy, Art, and the Illusion of Nature	213	(5)
Subjective Fun Begets Objective Distress	218	(5)
Transcendentalism and Materialism	223	(4)
The Instrumental Subject	227	(3)
Evil and Esthetic Life	230	(6)
Realism and Objective Alienation	236	(3)
Broken	239	(5)
The Topsy-Turvy World	244	(3)
Thoughtful Matter	247	(3)
Grandville's Museum	250	(3)
The Skin as Esthetic Modernity	253	(8)
Christ's Exemplum	261	(2)
The Death's Head	263	(1)
Still Life	264	(3)
``The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare''	267	(3)
Dialectical History	270	(2)
Ruins	272	(6)
Judgment Day	278	(5)
Notes	283	(16)
Bibliography	299	(8)
Index	307