{"id":443,"date":"2021-03-26T08:28:22","date_gmt":"2021-03-26T00:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=443"},"modified":"2021-03-22T12:37:14","modified_gmt":"2021-03-22T04:37:14","slug":"its-pretty-dead-on-curator-laura-raicovich-on-a-1954-article-about-the-state-of-western-museums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/its-pretty-dead-on-curator-laura-raicovich-on-a-1954-article-about-the-state-of-western-museums\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s Pretty Dead-On\u2019: Curator Laura Raicovich on a 1954 Article About the State of Western Museums"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today, critics of museums\u2019 values point to histories of colonialism and structural racism. Museums, they insist, are anything but neutral. In an essay titled \u201cThe Ideal Museum\u201d in the January 1954 issue of\u00a0<i>ARTnews<\/i>, British art historian\u00a0<a id=\"auto-tag_kenneth-clark\" href=\"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/\" data-tag=\"kenneth-clark\">Kenneth Clark<\/a>\u00a0considered the hidden politics behind Western institutions, exploring the ways that millennia-old collecting habits among the wealthy influenced how museums were run.\u00a0<i>ARTnews<\/i>\u00a0asked for a response to the essay from\u00a0<a id=\"auto-tag_laura-raicovich\" href=\"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/\" data-tag=\"laura-raicovich\">Laura Raicovich<\/a>, the former director of institutions including New York\u2019s Queens Museum and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and the author of the forthcoming book\u00a0<i>Culture Strike: Art in an Age of Protest<\/i>. Raicovich\u2019s first reaction to Clark\u2019s analysis: \u201cIt\u2019s pretty dead-on.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"text-align: center;\"><i>The splendor of the great princely collections <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/AtelierAuctionsg\">[forerunners of modern museums]<\/a> was \u2026 inseparable from an element of snobbishness. Like everything connected with princes and millionaires, they were sometimes no more than a buttress to vanity, and so they became swollen and sycophantic.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p5\"><span class=\"s4\">He\u2019s acknowledging these standards of tastes as being highly idiosyncratic and not necessarily based in scholarship. He\u2019s questioning the form of expertise, and that\u2019s something I think is incredibly contemporary, in the sense that we need to be questioning the neutrality of the museum, in part because societal conditions are creating the desire to change. [Certain politics] are embedded in the structure of the museum, and undoing them requires acknowledging that they exist there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"text-align: center;\"><i>[Architect William] Lethaby\u2019s famous statement that \u201ca great building must not be one man thick, but many men thick,\u201d applies to a great gallery.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p5\"><span class=\"s4\">The great director, or the great curator, is exalted, and though there are many people who do day-to-day stuff, the people who are running the vision and making big decisions [receive praise]. It\u2019s the great individual mind\u2014usually male, usually white, usually well-educated\u2014enacting some great form of visionary act. The reality is: museums are profoundly collective enterprises. What if we really imagined them that way?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"text-align: center;\"><i>The fact is that works of art are like wealth; they move about from one part of the world to another, and at first it seems very shocking; but after they have been in possession of one place or person for long enough, the situation becomes respectable, and people are scandalized when they move again.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p5\"><span class=\"s4\">I am generally of the opinion that changing things is good because we need to be thinking in new ways all the time. While I have certain favorite things I love to visit [in museums] and will be heartbroken if I can\u2019t visit those, ultimately I\u2019ll find something else to enjoy. It\u2019s something I respect about what the Museum of Modern Art is doing to reinstall its collection. It\u2019s trying to reimagine what change is and what storytelling can do for artworks that were excluded. If there is a desire for greater participation from a larger swath of the public, we have to address inequities and biases.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Source:https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today, critics of museums\u2019 values point to histories of colonialism and structural racism. Museums, they insist, are anything but neutral. In an essay titled \u201cThe Ideal Museum\u201d in the January 1954 issue of\u00a0ARTnews, British art historian\u00a0Kenneth Clark\u00a0considered the hidden politics behind Western institutions, exploring the ways that millennia-old collecting habits among the wealthy influenced how [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,7,4,3],"tags":[118],"class_list":{"0":"post-443","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-auction","9":"category-events","10":"category-gallery","11":"category-latest-news","12":"tag-the-ideal-museum"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>\u2018It\u2019s Pretty Dead-On\u2019: Curator Laura Raicovich on a 1954 Article About the State of Western Museums - 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