Reading the art museum
M Plant
10 points * 3 hours per week * First semester * Clayton
The 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 address (i) the rise of the public museum and theories of connoisseurship and collecting in the eighteenth century; and (ii) 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 are 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 are topics for discussion. 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. A detailed bibliography will be issued.
Assessment
Class paper and research essay (7500 words): 100%
Preliminary reading
Holt E G (ed.) The art of all nations 1850-1873: The emerging role of exhibitions and critics Anchor, 1981
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