Page 45 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

OBJECT || 29

of the marketplace into the museum (Sherman 1994: 125). He discusses how the
commission appointed to oversee the setting up of the Louvre as a national
museum in the 1790s attempted to distance it from the market by refusing to
have art dealers included in their number (Sherman 1994: 133). However, in
Quatremère’s view, the museum was already caught up in commerce because it
replaced art’s original value with its market value. The eighteenth-century art
market established the exchange value of paintings and sculptures on the basis
of highly specialized understandings of artistic form and technique. This system
of value is associated with the emergence of a narrow, professionalized ‘art
world’ disconnected from the broader public. Using Quatremère’s writings,
Sherman argues that the museum transferred this private system of exchange
into the public sphere: by detaching the art object from its life-context, it makes
the market’s criteria of value into the main means of understanding the value of
art in the museum. Criteria originally meant to establish the exchange-value of
an antiquity (including age, authenticity, discriminations of technique and
style) came to dominate the museum. Potential buyers understood the value of
art objects in the art market because they were skilled at seeing those qualities
which, according to the criteria, established each object as more or less valuable.
When this market-oriented notion of aesthetic value passes over into the
museum, all museum visitors are like potential buyers – more or less skilled in
evaluating the objects presented to them. Notions of beauty proceed from these
learnt evaluative techniques but they seem to emanate from the artwork itself.
Just as exchange value passes for an innate quality of commodities, the value
system which established the exchangeability of the art object comes to be seen
as a property of that object. Like a wolf in a sheepskin coat, exchange value
sneaks into the museum in the form of aesthetic value, and parades itself as
transcendent and universal (Sherman 1994: 129).
This would seem to suggest that the market criteria of value and the aesthetic
qualities which make something worth contemplating in the museum are
identical. Therefore aesthetic contemplation in the museum is not too different
from the contemplation of goods in the marketplace. Yet, as Maleuvre says, a
work of art is more than just a sensuous thing; it is a reflective commentary on
the world. In contrast, the sensuality of commodities tends to be seen as
something harnessed to their economic function, a false appearance purely
dedicated to inspiring desire in potential buyers. In this sense, the commodity is
‘the antithesis of the aesthetic object’ or ‘a grisly caricature of the authentic
artefact’ (Eagleton 1990: 208–9). This is what the German Marxist philosopher
Wolfgang Haug (1986) calls commodity aesthetics.
If, in theory, it is difficult to wholly disentangle the aesthetic experience to be
had inside the art museum from its ‘grisly’ counterpart in commodity aesthetics,
in practice they are entangled because of the way in which museums and stores