Collecting, organising, and displaying found objects, natural and material culture appears to be a universal human impulse. While museums as we commonly understand them find their origins in early modern European cabinets of curiosity and courtly collections, and are formalized in the late enlightenment, the founding of museums has skyrocketed since World War II. What is it about museums – what they do and what they represent – that holds such enduring significance?
Working roughly chronologically, but with throughlines that cut across periods, we will examine the history of collecting, focusing predominantly on Europe and North America. We will journey from early modern cabinets of curiosity to the beginnings of the modern museum to the museum in the digital age: Virtual Van Gogh, anyone?
Along the way, we will consider the production and categorisation of knowledge and difference, including the differentiation, over time, of separate 'natural', 'social', and art historical categories, collections, and sites of inquiry (looking, amongst other institutions, at Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum, Museum of Natural History, and Pitt Rivers Museum).
While we will discuss many different types of museum, we will focus increasingly on the art museum. We will also see how modern and contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol, Mark Dion, Coco Fusco, Andrea Fraser, and Fred Wilson have both adopted/adapted and critiqued museum histories and practices: the museum has become a 'medium' for art-making in its own right. Indeed, throughout the course, we will approach the notion of the 'museum' as variously a collection, as architecture, as an institution, and a site of social, political, and cultural memory and meaning-making. We will consider how changing modes of curation shape our perception of art and artefacts, while also powerfully delineating ideas of nation, self, and other(s).
Towards the end of the course, we will take up key current debates in the field, including restitution, repatriation, digitization, and decolonization. The course will encourage connection with/visits to relevant museums in students’ own locales, or via 'virtual field trips' and digital engagement.