ESSAY Q’s

1. ESSAY Q’s • As Greg Denning notes: “there is no escape from the politics of our knowledge.” How relevant is this formulation to the understanding of the strategies of display in a museum? • George Baker states: “A corporate model of the museum addresses its public as consumers of culture, as it increasingly enters into competition with the industries of leisure and entertainment.” Discuss

2. Essay Q’s • Dan Cameron: “Any definition of art – regardless of the era – which does not incorporate the aspirations of the average citizen toward a better life seems to be missing the point.” Discuss. • Maxwell L. Anderson: “What the public needs most from art museums is integrity in the fulfillment of an educational mandate, and curiosity about how diverse audiences can be served without pandering.” Discuss.

3. Essay Qs. • David A. Ross: “In an era in which the Internet supports a new set of direct relationships between artists and audiences, is the museum’s agency of decreasing importance?” Discuss. • Olu Oguibe: “Over the past century the museum, in all its forms,has evolved from a charitable repository of culture to a commercial entertainment outlet that in many cases is hardly distinguishable from the movie house or the circus.” Discuss.

4. Essay Qs • Olu Oguibe: “The museum will survive as a structure because of its symbolism, because it will continue to represent evolving definitions of Taste.” Discuss.

5. Essay Qs. • Why are “blockbuster” exhibitions described as the “fiscal heroin” of the museum business? What is a “blockbuster.” Write a detailed account of a blockbuster exhibition, focusing on its controversy and/or nature of its success. • Olu Oguibe: “Taste, ultimately, is a class matter, and all Taste is institutionally determined.” Discuss.

6. Essay Qs • Barbara Buhler Lynes: “The biggest challenge museums face in the future is finding ways of keeping themselves viable financially while charting new paths that lead them away from the corporate models that increasingly threaten to transform the museum into nothing more than a ‘commercial entertainment outlet’.” Discuss

7. Essay Qs • Miwon Kwon: “There is a fundamental difference between art and design even if its hard to tell the difference these days. Populism is not radical politics! A society that elides differences and specifities in its cultural landscape is antithetical, in my view, to a democratic society.” Discuss. • Olu Oguibe: “the audience that crowds out a Monet show but keeps its distance from a contemporary exhibit may not be saying much about the work in the contemporary exhibition itself, but rather a whole lot of other issues and factors that range from marketing and public relations to canonization, cumulative discourse, and veneration of the dead.” Discuss.

8. Essay Qs • Simon Leung: “We don’t necessarily need to invoke Pierre Bourdiieu to note that museums have always been the flip side to, the idealized and codependent banner of, the riches gained by the engine of capital, and modern art has always been tied to a patronage that comes from the ruling class – historically the new bourgeoisie. In other words, museums have always been corporate entities: they are the repositories of Cultural Capital guaranteed by real capital.” Discuss.

9. Essay Q’s • Maurice Berger: “Museums must make decisions about disciplinary boundaries (what constitutes ‘Art,’ for example), the period, nationality, and type of art they are mandated to exhibit and collect, the audience they are trying to reach, the architecture of their buildings, and the tastefulness, beauty, and importance of the objects they sanction and acquire.” Discuss.

10. Essay Qs • Maurice Berger: “How and why do museums make decisions about what they will sanction and support and what they will not, and how do these decisions lead to exclusionary practices? Why, for so many years, did most art museums ignore women and people of color? How do cultural conceptions of taste, quality, or elitism inform these exclusions? When are these exclusionary policies censorious, or racist, or sexist, or delimiting?” Discuss.