오늘의 인용

source: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n06/hal-foster/after-the-white-cube

"Just as the viewer must be posited as passive in order to be activated, the artwork must be deemed dead so that it can be resuscitated. This ideology, central to the modern discourse on the art museum, is also fundamental to art history ‘as a humanistic discipline’, whose mission, Erwin Panofsky wrote 75 years ago, is to ‘enliven what otherwise would remain dead’. Here the proper retort in our time comes from the art historian Amy Knight Powell: ‘Neither institution nor individual can restore life to an object that never had it. The promiscuity of the work of art – its return, reiteration and perpetuation beyond its original moment – is the surest sign it never lived.’

The upshot is this: viewers are not so passive that they have to be activated, and artworks are not so dead that they have to be animated, and, if designed and programmed intelligently, museums can allow for both entertainment and contemplation, and promote some understanding along the way. That is, they can be spaces where artworks reveal their ‘promiscuity’ with other moments of production and reception. A central role of the museum is to operate as a space-time machine in this way, to transport us to different periods and cultures – diverse ways of perceiving, thinking, depicting and being – so that we might test them in relation to our own and vice versa, and perhaps be transformed a little in the process. This access to various thens and nows is especially urgent during an era of consumerist presentism, political parochialism and curtailed citizenship. In the end, if museums aren’t places where different constellations of past and present are crystallised, why have them at all?" Hal Foster