After completing this course students are able to:
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Identify the main characteristics of the museum as institution
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Describe some of the major players and key exhibitions
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Approach, describe and assess an exhibition script
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Distinguish some of the practical matters involving the display of collection pieces
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Engage concepts, methods and theories in order to analyze and explain empirical observations
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Develop a critically informed approach to the analysis of museal phenomena
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Conduct small-scale research into an exhibition
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Content
Museum Studies, sometimes called Museology, deals with the birth, development and operation of the public museum as one of the key institutions of the modern world. While collections of art and other objects are probably as old and widely distributed as human society itself, collecting and preserving valued objects for public display, with state support or, increasingly, by (semi) private foundations, is a more recent phenomenon. The institution of museum is connected to Art History and other academic disciplines since it is the place where art works and other objects were organized, preserved and researched by specialists, and exhibited for a broad audience. Starting in the eighteenth century, museums became one of the instruments whereby nation states created and democratized national pasts using a repertoire of objects and images that were displayed in adapted or purpose-built architecture (such as the British Museum and the Louvre). Musealisation as a process therefore involves removing art works and other objects from the original context of manufacture or use and re-installing them in a new order according to well-defined criteria – such as chronology, school, genre, or theme. Certain objects were further distinguished as masterpieces or (type) specimens, this distinction being reflected in their physical location in architectural space and in relation to comparable works installed in it. For example, Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watch (1642) occupies a specific position in Cuypers’ (1885) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, expressing the changed late-nineteenth-century assessment of this work.
Since the inception of the public museum, practices of storage, preservation, classification, display, and public education have undergone many changes. Part I of the course discusses a number of key shifts in museum displays from the late-eighteenth/ early-nineteenth-century to the present, and will include two site visits (in the Netherlands) and written assignments. We examine the historical legacies of particular institutions and contemporary developments drawing upon several theoretical and methodological approaches. Noordegraaf’s study of the changing scripts of Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam is combined with several other key texts. Students initiate research into an exhibition of their own choice and write a substantiated research proposal. Part II examines the extent to which twentieth-century patrons influence the making of contemporary museums and exhibitions, and will include one further site visit (in the Netherlands) and assignment. Rybczynski’s biography of the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, UEA, Norwich, charts the process of negotiation among the key protagonists in this new museum. Students pursue the research proposal submitted earlier for their term paper. The final exam tests students’ knowledge and understanding of the concepts, theories, methods and cases covered throughout the course.
Format
There are two classes per week: the first consists of a lecture, supplemented by film; and, on three occasions, excursions to different museums (these are scheduled on Tuesdays, using class time and in the afternoons). The second weekly class consists of discussion of assignments based on the week’s readings and (if applicable) the museum assignment.
Pre-requisite for: UCHUMHAR31 Modern Art and UCHUMHAR32 Heritage; and for the UCU Cultural Heritage Program (CHIP)
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