I actually encourage a complete read of this one, because the description and detail is wonderful. But here’s a grab quote (and a half) to convince you about how wonderful the writing is for this article:

An art historian who has not been to the Barnes told me that she had heard the installation was “a distraction from the art.” These are the types of arts professionals—the philistines and academics—whom Barnes wanted to keep out of his museum.

It is such people who are hell-bent on turning museums into shopping malls with ease of access to the “customer.”  Through homogenization and expansion, they have already ruined once-great institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Morgan Library. There is a belief that getting more people in the door is a museum’s prime function. As early as the 1930s, Barnes warned about individuals who supposedly are on the side of art but who “mistake the husk for the kernel, the shadow for the substance.” Unfortunately, these are increasingly the people in charge of our museums. Barnes gave life to a unique institution, and its present-day stewards should be obligated to follow the ethical oath of others (medical doctors and art conservators among them) entrusted with the care of the living: First, do no harm. The relocation of the Barnes is disguised as altruism, but it is fueled solely by ignorance and avarice.

Museums are peculiar places. While the great national collections and the vast universal museums are essential to a country’s cultural life, so, too, are its small, idiosyncratic venues. But with every renovation, museums are becoming less peculiar. Initially “Wünderkammer” or “cabinets of curiosity,” museums have existed for barely 400 years. Repositories of art and artifacts, they bring us riches from ancient civilizations and faraway lands. But they are much more than collections of cultural fragments, and their role is greater than that of simply caretaker. Museums are accountable also as caretakers for our relationship to art.

Art evolves as we evolve. And as art evolves so, the argument goes, must museums: No Museum Left Behind. Museums are the principal nurturers of our engagement with art, dictating not only what art is but also the environment and decorum surrounding it. And art is dependent upon the life we allow it. Before the museum, there was no such thing as art: statues, fetishes, masks, and pictures were tools and never meant to be elevated to pedestals. The primary weakness of the museum is that through its displacement of objects from their original contexts, things are disavowed of their functions and disempowered of their magical properties. Statues become sculptures, crucifixes become compositions, and portraits become pictures.

But this weakness can also be a strength. In the museum, the crucifix—out of context and freed from its explicit functions, symbols, and metaphors—can operate on a universal level: It is allowed to speak not just to or for Christians but to all—and to other works of art. In the museum, the crucifix, just like the totem, the fertility figure, the landscape, the nude, and the abstract painting, communicates to us as an expression of universal values. In art, spirituality is not denominational but expressed through plastic form.

And then,

Artworks still have power. But that power hangs in the balance. Recently, museums have come to resemble entertainment complexes. They are all expanding, and they are all starting to look the same. In predictable, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses fashion, the architect Renzo Piano, who butchered the Morgan Library, is now designing the expansion of the Gardner. But bigger isn’t always better. Museums are living institutions. They flourish in variety. If we persist in homogenizing these institutions at the present rate, it won’t be long before all that remains of the Barnes Foundation—and perhaps the collections of New York’s Frick, Washington’s Phillips, and London’s Soane—will be a catalogue in the way there remains a catalogue of the John G. Johnson Collection (which the Philadelphia Museum of Art absorbed against the dead benefactor’s explicit wishes nearly a century ago).

I’m listed in Tumblweeds, a user-generated community directory that rates Tumblr bloggers by their number of followers. Find me listed in #museums, #art, #history

museumstudies:

themuseumjunkie:

The Rubin Museum of Art, located in Chelsea, showcases elegantly curated special exhibitions and an impressive permanent collection of Himalayan art. The six-year-old museum focuses on art of the Himalayan region, illuminating the underrepresented Nepalese and Tibetan Buddhist arts. The…

Latest exhibition running (28 January to 4 July 2011) at the museum is “Body Language: The Yogis of India and Nepal” - photographs by Thomas Kelly. Sounds good!

asskickingart:

So a friend of mine recently asked me to do a post on gorilla painters.

(^this came up in a google image search for ‘gorilla painting’)

Since my friend didn’t specify whether she meant actual gorillas or not, I’m going to assume she was talking about the Guerrilla Girls:

The…

(via sympathyfortheartgallery)