“Les musées des beaux-arts et le beau,” L’avenir des musées: Actes du colloque organisé au musée du Louvre, ed

“Les musées des beaux-arts et le beau,” L’avenir des musées: Actes du colloque organisé au musée du Louvre, ed. Jean Galard, Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001, pp. 503-519

Art Museums and the Beautiful

Ivan Gaskell

Once again, scholars are addressing beauty and the beautiful. What a change this is from the situation just a short time ago! “Beauty” and “beautiful” were almost taboo words in academic discourse, either ignored, or denigrated. A few years ago at my university a leading art historical theorist could advise a junior colleague, “Never use the word ‘beauty’—it will ruin your career!”

But “beauty” didn’t disappear altogether. As one might expect, it persisted in philosophical aesthetics. For cultural theorists, though, “beauty” meant triviality, or ignorant conservatism. Not until the last few years, when beauty was reconciled with Foucauldian concerns, has theory taken the plunge into the beautiful. One example is the anthropologist, Mark Johnson’s 1997 volume, Beauty and Power: Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern Philippines: a study of Philippino transvestites. Yet beauty has returned to the academic agenda via less politically correct routes. For example, in 1999 the philosopher, James Kirwan published Beauty and the literary scholar, Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just. Beauty is firmly back on the academic agenda.

Although beauty may have fled the academy for a time, had it ever left art museums? A walk through the galleries of almost any art museum suggests not. And the term itself retained its currency in exhibition titles. Beauty and Tranquility: The Eli Lilly Collection of Chinese Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1983 is but one example. For academic skeptics the continued appeal to “beauty” in museums was simply indicative of how far behind the theoretical times they have remained. On the other hand, some museum scholars have taken the return of beauty to theory to be a vindication of their own aesthetic assumptions. Nothing could be more mistaken. The role of beauty in art museums demands to be examined, but not as the “timeless issue” proposed by the recent exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century. The academic return to beauty and the beautiful as topics of investigation ought to make that inquiry within art museums all the more urgent, rather than less so.

Indeed, beauty—and that word should always prompt the mental question, “Whose beauty?”—might even be said to be rightly on its way out within art museums, at least, as it has generally been perceived and pursued to date. I believe we need to look at beauty anew. We should not give it pride of place. Indeed, beauty may often be irrelevant. In art museums the beautiful, in the old sense, can take care of itself. We should treat beauty in a new sense. It should be just one of a considerable number of problems to be addressed dispassionately in art museums. Rather than treating beauty as an absolute value, we might rather approach it in terms of what critical theorists and anthropologists call “the beauty discourse.” In doing so, though, we should not make the mistake of thinking that “beauty” can disappear through deconstruction. It remains a way of describing certain qualities, but should be treated as interdependent with other qualities.

We simply do not need to hoard beauty and show it off as our primary criterion of display. To find the beautiful is the overwhelming expectation of art museum visitors. They know art museums to be supersaturated with beauty. Art museums wallow in a Rabelaisian excess of beauty. In order to explore objects, and our relationship to them, in a broader and more complex manner we might follow the lead of art itself. Art now—both its making and its use—concerns a wide range of problems in addition to aesthetic issues. These include problems of human perception, identity, and conduct. Beauty is but one issue. It ought to be seen in relation to others, and then only if it happens to relevant.

One example must suffice: Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987). For a time in the late 1980s it was an icon of outrageousness. By now, though, it has been fully tamed and domesticated. It was even featured, with a full-page illustration, in a recent issue of Christie’s Magazine.[1] Yet Serrano hit a nerve by photographing a devotional object—a crucifix—immersed in urine. In this work, and in others employing bodily fluids, Serrano used a seeming desecration to raise questions about human values in relation to abjection that have a particular resonance in the age of AIDS. It is also formally beautiful. But its beauty properly commands our attention only insofar as it is related to the problems it evokes concerning human values and conduct. The same might be said of Renaissance devotional art. Such are our postmodern intellectual circumstances. The pressing questions now are not so much to do with a modernist interest in what might be particular to art in its various manifestations, as with how our experience of the world and of each other is articulated by our use of objects and the ideas associable with them. In this context beauty is only of interest insofar as it is instrumental. It seems to me that attention to such problems—not the identification and exemplification of the beautiful alone—is our proper business. To pay such attention we must range far beyond what we generally think of as art in order to accommodate a much wider range of objects—and thinking—in our museum work.

First, we must recognize the institutional power, intellectually speaking, of art museums. That power depends wholly on the discipline with which objects have been assembled within them over many decades. These objects in all their variety are not simply things of a kind collected according to aesthetic criteria—art—but intellectual and cultural capital. Its accumulation and preponderance is what allows us to introduce other things that themselves then receive similar attention. Such things either become art, or at least assume the status of art, while in association with art in art museums.

What, then, is art? I shall take the route proposed by Nelson Goodman. In Ways of Worldmaking (1978), Goodman shifts the question from “What is art?” to “When is art?”.[2] “An object may be a work of art at some times and not at others,” states Goodman.[3] He ties that matter of functioning as a work of art to an object’s symbolic role, or lack thereof, in any given circumstance. While functioning symbolically, an object is a work of art. Thus:

The stone is normally no work of art while in the driveway, but may be so when on display in an art museum. In the driveway, it usually performs no symbolic function. In the art museum, it exemplifies certain of its properties—e.g., properties of shape, color, texture. … On the other hand, a Rembrandt painting may cease to function as a work of art when used to replace a broken window or as a blanket.[4]

Therefore the incorporation of an object within an art museum, whether temporarily or permanently, in practice renders it worthy of attention, irrespective of whether we think it beautiful.

I want to try to refine Goodman’s argument regarding “When is art?”. He proposes that the very act of incorporation by means of display within the art museum confers the status of art upon an object, his example being a stone. I would argue, though, that such incorporation is not a simple act of designation; rather it is discursive. By describing how a stone’s symbolic function is awakened when in an art museum—how it comes to exemplify formal properties—Goodman ties its art status to generally understood aesthetic criteria. He fails to comment on the fact that the dominant invisible discourse—the ideology—of the art museum is one of aesthetic value. To designate a stone as art is itself to place it within a particular discourse—that of the aesthetic. But, as I have already proposed, discourse within art museums is properly not confined to the aesthetic. Art museum discourse can concern any other problem that can be addressed by the display of objects, such as the problems we saw addressed by Serrano’s Piss Christ. These problems may involve the aesthetic, but are not necessarily wholly dependent upon it, nor determined by it. Therefore it is quite possible to exempt any given object brought within an art museum from consideration according to any criteria of beauty. To take this course, though, means judging how that object might be used discursively within that art museum. That discursive deployment must be good: that is, it must successfully fulfil a coherent intellectual or affective goal. Being art is an inevitable quality of such objects, but they are not necessarily beautiful. Thus art museums can readily accommodate non-beautiful objects (but again, we should always ask “Non-beautiful according to whom?”).

We must also be aware that Goodman is operating within a distinctively modernist paradigm of the treatment of objects. This is clear when he states that incorporation of the stone into the museum prompts us to awareness of its formal qualities—shape, color, texture—and to assign it a symbolic status in this respect. He assumes that our ability to choose to perceive the formal qualities of any object, and hence to regard it as art, is a natural propensity, rather than a culturally contingent reaction. We ought also to imagine circumstances in which the response to the stone once in the art museum might be different. That response might be to do with a range of other questions and perceived qualities. These might concern human relations and conduct for example, and we might consider them even at the expense of the stone’s formal beauty.

Indeed, in such postmodern circumstances non-beautiful objects might rightly predominate. Their use may deplete the accumulation of aesthetic capital within art museums—their signification functioning by implicit contrast with the consensually beautiful—but art museums can well afford it. When within art museums, such objects do not thereby become beautiful, but they do function as art.

Let us take an extreme example: the Museum of Bad Art, in Dedham, Massachusetts. This is a parody museum comprising a collection of hideous kitsch. Its staff makes no claim for beauty on behalf of the objects, but their status as art is unquestioned. Indeed, it is unquestionable. It is a museum-turned-upside-down, in the sense of a medieval world-turned-upside-down, for it is founded on the premise that art in art museums must be and is good, in the sense of beautiful. MOBA offers no alternative model of the museum, only a literal inversion of terms. Its criterion for the accession of any object is explicitly one of aesthetic judgement: it has to be bad, in the sense of ugly.

The Museum of Bad Art, which held its first exhibition in 1993, has not only been adept at parodying art museums in its acquisitions and exhibits, but has been especially effective at exploiting new technology: CD-ROMs and the internet. It has a sophisticated website (www.glyphs.com/moba), offers a virtual museum on CD-ROM, a catalogue,[5] and other merchandise. To summarize its aims, I quote from its mission statement:

Bad art is all around us and all too often neglected, ignored or hidden away. All the pieces in the MOBA collection were rescued/discovered/unearthed from various states of ignoble neglect. Many were pulled from the trash, some were purchased for spare change at yard sales, others were pulled from closets and attics and donated to the museum by generous donors who were grateful that there was a place of honor to hang them. The pieces in the collection range from the work of talented artists that have gone awry, to crude works by exuberant artists barely in control of their brush. What they all have in common is a special quality that sets them apart in one way or another from the merely incompetent.[6]

The Museum of Bad Art is one-dimensional. The critique of art museums and the art world that it offers is limited owing to its literal, if excellently executed, world-turned-upside-down character. Yet none the less it has to date escaped institutionalization within that extended art world, which includes academic discussion, owing to its lack of intellectual pretension. The organizers—a group of dedicated amateurs—have not made the mistake of presenting the project as itself a work of art. By contrast, that strategy has already been followed a number of times, most conspicuously by the Belgian poet-turned-artist, Marcel Broodthaers.

Broodthaers’s Musée d’Art Moderne assumed various manifestations between 1968 and 1972. It was, broadly speaking, a mutating work of conceptual art. It first took tangible form as the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section XIXème Siècle at Broodthaers’s home and studio in Brussels, with an opening on September 27, 1968. Its most elaborate manifestation was Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute at the Städtisches Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, May 16 to July 9, 1972.

Unlike the first installation, which consisted of art packing cases and postcards of nineteenth-century paintings, the Düsseldorf installation comprised 282 items from innumerable museums and private collections. Some were actual objects, others reproductions. It was accompanied by a two-volume catalogue.[7] The mutations of Broodthaers’s museum do not imply a methodically organized, consistent whole. Its various sections and departments cannot be ordered according to a consistent taxonomy. The ordering of this museum questions the value commonly attached in museums to consistency. Broodthaers constructed taxonomic categories unknown in other art museums, such as the Department of Eagles.

The varied representation of eagles, ostensibly from the oligocene geological period to the present, was the subject of the Düsseldorf installation. Broodthaers brought together a bewildering array of otherwise unrelated objects. They ranged from a pre-Columbian stone temple element from Mexico, to commercial designs adapted from heraldry on contemporary wine bottle labels. He proposed a single criterion of relationship among these disparate things—their representation of eagles—as being sufficient to assemble them for display: but pointedly not as art, for each numbered object or group was labeled, “This is not a work of art”. This negative designation explicitly appealed to the work of two predecessors: Marcel Duchamp’s readymades (inverting his device of declaring an everyday object to be a work of art), and Michel Foucault’s text on René Magritte’s disingenuous distinction between an everyday thing and its representation in a work of art, Ceci n’est pas une pipe.[8]

In his own museum Broodthaers turned the art world upside-down by taking objects generally designated to be works of art and objects that are not, placing them in his art museum and using the implicit authority of that museum to label them as specifically not works of art. By Goodman’s criteria their treatment suffices to render them art, despite any ironic labeling to the contrary. Yet such labeling indicates the irony of their position in the fictive museum vis-à-vis the positions they would otherwise occupy in the world. Their discursive disposition within a group defined by a single criterion (representing eagles) may have been parodic, but they all accurately satisfy that criterion. I don’t think this group of objects tells us very much about the representation of eagles, or the migration of symbols, for instance. Of course, it is not supposed to. Yet to suggest that this selection criterion—representing eagles—serves above all to demonstrate the arbitrariness of all museum collection criteria, would be banal. When considering that matter, coherence, not arbitrariness is the issue.

We should recognize that Broodthaers’s museum participates fully within, and is now wholly subordinate to, the art museum structure it ostensibly criticizes. The incorporation of objects from the Department of Eagles as art by Broodthaers in the canonical displays of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels confirms this. It takes not only artists, but curators to propose alternative taxonomies of objects effectively. This is why the Museum of Bad Art, Dedham is not simply a vernacular version of Broodthaers’s museum, but rather a more effective indicator, museologically, of what museum staffs might do. This is not only because, first, unlike the Belgian artist’s inventions (which have been easily subsumed by “real” museums), MOBA fully resists incorporation within the art world, other than as a professionally despised, but popularly applauded, phenomenon; and, second, because MOBA is not a piece of installation art functioning within the discourse of contemporary art, but rather an actual museum functioning within the terms—even as a parody—of real museums. The key discourse is that of the museum, not art itself.

In the end, we need both MOBA and Broodthaers (and their likes). We need the intelligence of artists working within their elastic and ever-changing terms of reference, especially when they concern themselves with problems beyond art itself and the politics of its diffusion, perception and reception. In this respect Broodthaers, for all his successful indication of certain boundaries and determinants, remained a pure modernist. We need the intelligence of curators who are prepared to ask questions of their institutions’ procedures and assumptions, subverting these from within for good reason and to good ends. And we need art museum directors who, like Marcel Broodthaers, can say: “Je suis le directeur. Je m’en fous.”[9]

These observations lead me to believe that the future of art museums lies in their visually discursive use of a far wider range of objects than heretofore. Where will these objects—these additional objects—come from? What will they be? First, the successful use of such objects depends on how they are deployed discursively in relation to selections of objects already within art museums’ existing holdings that were gathered in accordance with existing criteria, including their beauty. Second, their incorporation within displays need not necessarily mean that they are admitted permanently into the collections of art museums. Third, their display in explicit or implicit relation to art museums’ existing contents must be in response to seriously posed questions. These questions concern how we might relate to objects in manners not available to us within our daily lives, as part of the hegemonic world of commodities. That is, such displays must awaken our critical faculties in the broadest sense. Those that appear to collude with the values of the hegemonic world of commodities rather than to question them—such as the exhibition Herb Ritts: Work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1996)—fail this test, and not simply because they appear commercially opportunistic. There is no reason, though, why photographs by Ritts should not be used in art museum displays, but only when their use in that context causes us to question, rather than simply confirm, their habitual use in the world.

Everyday commodities constitute one class of material available for art museum use, though they must be used with the utmost care and discernment, and in full awareness of the way in which imputing aesthetic qualities to them can mask their commercial status and function. Another class of objects promises more: objects that have been collected according to ethnographic or anthropological criteria. A breakdown between the separate consideration of objects ethnographically on the one hand and aesthetically within a hegemonic western mode on the other promises much as a means of shaping the postcontemporary art museum. Of course, this can be brought about satisfactorily only if we are fully aware of the ideologies that inform both constituents.

Although I contend that art museums should not be in thrall to art history, neither should they ignore it, and art history is unmistakably moving in a more global direction. The emergence of world art histories that genuinely challenge western hegemonic assumptions can help art museums to broaden the range of objects to which they attend geographically and chronologically. Questioning and breaking down the distinctions between collections treated as art and collections treated ethnographically will be one consequence of museological responses to world art histories. This will inevitably lead to discursive combinations and juxtapositions of objects that art history and anthropology to date have at best inhibited, if not prohibited. A concern with world art, and with ethnography as well, will release objects into hitherto unimagined couplings and proliferations.

Already the collections of the British Museum, London are being reintegrated, the objects designated “ethnographic” being returned from the Museum of Mankind to the main Bloomsbury site. I foresee a time when the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History will not be oblivious to one another’s existence on either side of New York’s Central Park. Perhaps the collections of the planned Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the Louvre will be equally and freely available to one another’s staffs and used by both.

But there must also be a third ingredient in the postcontemporary cocktail: recently made art. This would include, but not be confined to, the work of artists who address this very issue of cultural distinction. Some are ethnic advocate artists, from Native American or Australian Aboriginal communities, for example; while others are artists who explore cultural intermixture or interdependence. Indeed, we may find that intermixture, in the present and in the past, is of greater interest to us now than is cultural authenticity, the forms that either observers or participants hold to characterize cultures uniquely. Chronological exclusiveness plays little part in such explorations. In this context we must seriously reconsider the future of modern or contemporary art museums. Museums that attend solely to recent art are already sites of the nostalgia of anticipation. Their basis is a yearning to prolong an assumed present into a past yet to come. As soon as one grasps this, museums devoted exclusively to collecting modern and contemporary art become historical curiosities.

In conclusion: Where does beauty end up in this seeming anarchy of objects? I stated earlier that the beautiful can take care of itself—but can it? Yes, to the extent that those in search of the beautiful will always contrive to find it, no matter what curators do. The good use of objects in art museums is the curatorial imperative. That good use takes account of beauty, in the context of the discourse of beauty, whether fugitively or irrepressibly manifest. That good use is discursively inventive, sometimes in ways that may seem oblivious to the beautiful. We may seek new questions and new answers in relation to a variety of as yet scarcely conceived problems in the perceptual terms proper to art. The good use of art, while not necessarily addressing beauty directly, will never wholly evade it. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the beautiful not being part of any museological discourse, whether explicitly or implicitly. And the art that concerns us will be geographically and chronologically unrestricted. The beautiful can take care of itself, as long as—paradoxically—we make sure we take care of it too. Beauty is dead: Long live beauty!