Page 44 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Quatremère, the museum destroys the authentic living character of works of
art by making them perform as history lesson. The objects he was concerned
with were mostly antiquities – ancient Greek and Roman artefacts – that in his
view had beauty, inspirational purpose and therefore a ‘public function’ in
their original sites, which they lost through being removed and placed in
museums (Belting 2001: 40). When the museum removed them from their life-
contexts, where they had real social and moral purpose, it cut them adrift,
turned them back into ‘mere matter’. Quatremère saw the act of aesthetic
contemplation in the museum as the ‘sterile admiration’ of dead things (cited
in Maleuvre 1999: 16).
Quatremère saw art only existing as art when in its original context, and in
relation to use. Yet there is a strong tradition in Western philosophy which
defines art precisely by its uselessness: by its ability to stand for freedom by
standing outside the drudgery of day-to-day existence. As the cultural theorist
Didier Maleuvre argues, culture does not arise simply out of living, but by acts
of meditation on living, it transcends ‘embeddedness in being’ by stepping out
of the everyday and reflecting on it (Maleuvre 1999: 26–9). In this argument
the very idea of art is connected to its detachment from living circumstance –
the museum makes art, even whilst it also imprisons it and restricts its effects
on the world outside. From this perspective, Quatremère’s critique seems
nostalgic because it evokes a time/place where art and life were more authentic
because they were so closely interwoven. It also seems conservative because by
reducing art to usefulness and social relevance it sees it as little more than
‘society’s self-congratulating vote of confidence’. As Maleuvre says, ‘Insistence
on art’s entrenchment in immanence (to life, history, society) neutralizes it far
more than any museum display’ (1999: 33). Maleuvre argues that art is, by
definition, already detached, reflective and critical of society.
These two perspectives raise questions about the relation between art and the
commodity, and the museum and the marketplace. How does the ‘sterile’
admiration of ‘mere matter’ in the museum, which Quatremère described,
differ from the admiration of beautiful goods on sale in the department store?
If art is realized, rather than sterilized, by the museum, as Maleuvre suggests,
does that mean that the aesthetic contemplation it invites is deeper, or more
complex than the desirous looking invited by the commodity? And if things are
constituted as objects through acts of attention on the part of visitors, as well
as through the procedures and attentions of the museum, what happens when
the museum visitor brings to the museum those modes of attention she applies
in the marketplace? Does the museum, by its act of detachment, disallow this
possibility?
The art historian Daniel J. Sherman reads Quatremère’s critique of the
Louvre as suggestive of how the museum actually invites the evaluative criteria