The theory and culture of art museums and galleries
Margaret Plant
12 points * 2 hours per week * First semester * Clayton
This subject studies the history of museums and collecting. Students should gain a working knowledge of the principal international and Australian institutions responsible for the collection and display of art work and become aware of research issues relevant to institutional history and theory. The history of display will be a continuing focus. Seminars will address the rise of the public museum and theories of connoisseurship and collecting in the eighteenth century; the history of the Louvre in Paris and the Altes Museum in Berlin, museums in London in the nineteenth century - the National Gallery, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The American institutions will be studied with reference to the Metropolitan Museum, New York and the National Gallery, Washington and twentieth-century institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The formation and development of the Australian gallery, particularly the National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia will be subjects for seminars. The study of the museum in the later twentieth century will focus on such institutions as the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, together with discussion of the postmodernist critique of art institutions.
Assessment
First seminar paper (2500 words): 25% * Second seminar paper (3000 words): 35% * Research essay: 3500 words: 40%
Preliminary reading
Hooper-Greenhill E Museums and the shaping of knowledge Routledge, 1992
O'Doherty B Inside the white cube: The ideology of the gallery space Lapis, 1986
Holt E G (ed.) The art of all nations: 1850-1873. The emerging role of exhibitions and critics Anchor, 1981