Robert-Goldwater-Library

Quote of the Day

"I'm sure if John Cotton Dana were alive today, he'd have a blog."

Mary Sue Sweeney Price, Director, Newark Museum, at the panel discussion "Civic Life in Newark: The Legacy of John Cotton Dana," July 13, 2006, held on the opening of the exhibit A Tribute to John Cotton Dana, Commemorating the Sesquicentennial of His Birth, curated by William Dane and Bruce E. Ford and on view at the Newark Public Library from July 5 through September 2.

[Photo source]
{with apologies}

Brit post-mortem: "catastrophe sunk in a swamp of hubris..."

image source

via The Guardian:
Musée des bogus arts
France's new museum is an ill-judged disaster that rivals our very own dome for incompetence
by Fiachra Gibbons
Monday July 3, 2006

You may remember the Millennium Dome - big grey tent in Greenwich - cost a billion or so, give or take a couple of hundred mill. Now a useful navigational aid for lost pigeons and bleary-eyed travellers flying over the East End.

You may remember too, the soul-searching it provoked about why the British are incapable of doing anything decent on a grand scale. The French, we consoled ourselves, would never have conceived such a disaster. Well now they have. It's called the Musée du Quai Branly, the grandest museum built in Paris since the Centre Pompidou 30 years ago, and arguably the most important new one in Europe in a generation.

And it is, if you will forgive a little flourish of Gallic overstatement, a catastrophe sunk in a swamp of hubris, though there is a lovely caff and ace office block in the not quite finished garden.

At least with the dome we could all laugh at the idea of Peter Mandelson being in charge of something called the mind zone. Quai Branly makes you want to cry. Nor did the dome try to kill you (mind those badly finished stairs), or make you feel sick (the jungly lighting is giving visitors headaches) or manage to diss half the cultures of the world.

Like many messes, it began with the noblest of intentions. Long the pet project of Jacques Chirac, it was supposed, in the president's own words, to "put an end to the disregard of civilisations too long ignored or misunderstood ... to look upon the Other with greater knowledge, respect and openness of mind".

Heart of Darkness... or Apocalypse Now?

Totemic figures from Oceania on display at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, a museum devoted entirely to non-Western art.

..."The horror, the horror" ? New York Times arts writer Michael Kimmelman reams the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris:

A Heart of Darkness in the City of Light
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: July 2, 2006

[...] The most ambitious museum to open in Paris in 20 years, dedicated to non-European cultures, Quai Branly provoked a ruckus from the instant President Jacques Chirac came up with the idea for it more than a decade ago. It was his monument to French multiculturalism and, perhaps, to himself.

Two beloved Paris institutions had to be dismantled, the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens and the ethnographic department of the Musée de l'Homme, France's sublime natural history museum. Anthropologists, not to mention more than a few people who loved going to those museums, were furious. The familiar aesthetics-versus-ethnology question came up: Will religious, ceremonial and practical objects, never intended as art in the modern, Western sense, be showcased like baubles, with no context?

Given the current political climate, Quai Branly's eventual opening, after years of delay, seemed almost as if it had been scientifically calculated to ignite the maximum debate.

I couldn't tell whether Mr. Martin was being helpful or if he actually enjoyed the fuss. What did he think of his museum? I asked. He thought it was a "neutral environment" with "no aesthetic or philosophical line." I thought he was kidding.

He wasn't. If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and arranged with hardly any discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. Colonialism of a bygone era is replaced by a whole new French brand of condescension.

The dismay was obvious when I met museum directors, curators, anthropologists and art historians at a conference in Quai Branly, just before the museum's opening. For about an hour everyone on a panel talked about the need for better, more flexible museums, which seemed to me an obvious euphemism for the problem here, which nobody mentioned — until a scholar, Christian Feest, smiled, raised his eyebrows and tilted his head slightly.

He couldn't help, he said, pointing out the elephant in the room: How would Quai Branly overcome the obstacle of its own design? That shifted the atmosphere, as if tension had been released, and during the break I intercepted several African and American curators and a French art historian who all shook their heads and confided, as if revealing a private embarrassment, that Quai Branly was a missed opportunity and an inexplicable enterprise. An Australian architecture critic then sidled over and nodded toward Jean Nouvel, the museum's architect, who had been mobbed the day before at the press opening. Now he was standing alone. Everyone was passing him by on the way to hors d'oeuvres. [read on...]

How we saw 'others': a Pacific example

Slippery Word, Ambiguous Praxis: 'Race' and Late-18th-Century Voyagers in Oceania / by Bronwen Douglas

in Journal of Pacific History 41 (1) June 2006

ABSTRACT: This paper traces the presence, absence, and shifting connotations of the term 'race' and the idea of human classification in representations of indigenous Oceanian people by navigators, naturalists and artists on 18th-century British and French voyages. These ambiguous usages signified hardening European attitudes to human difference, as the holistic, 'environmentalist' explanations of the natural history of man lost ground to the differentiating physicalism of the new sciences of biology and physical anthropology. However, by correlating the generation of ideas with particular embodied encounters, I question the presumption that voyagers' representations of indigenous people were entirely determined by preconceptions derived from received knowledge and prevailing discourses. I suggest instead that indigenous behaviour and demeanour left latent countersigns in the language, tone and content of such travel literature and art — on which the emergent metropolitan science of man drew heavily to justify its deductions.

Portrait of William Dampier [source]

Individuals at Metropolitan Museum of Art networked locations can access the full text of the article through WATSONLINE.