3.24.2009

riddle me this

what came first:
large artworks or large museums?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're leaving out the aspect that while museums may have been adequate in size it was do to salon style hanging that may have limited both the scope and scale of a canvas and a place for it to hang for all time.

Anonymous said...

cave paintings

Anonymous said...

Adam, I believe "large museums" takes your point into account. Obviously institutions have long been adequately sized, in terms of raw square footage/wall space, to accommodate large works. The question posed here covers the scope of museum curation mentality, I believe. Plus, it's a contemporary art blog. Can't we accept as given the discussion should launch from a post-salon-style approach?

Anonymous said...

Anonymous, quite obviously this blog intends to cover the contemporary. To ask a question, which focuses on antecedence, it seems necessary to acknowledge what prepared a need for the white cube. There shouldn't be any acceptance in neglecting the aspects that led to a criticism of museum space. This riddle is determined entirely on scope, but not solely in a curatorial sense. Institutional critique doesn't seek to quantify relationships by scale as Minimalism did before it. "Large" is an odd word to use here. The intention could mean big like a Christoph Buchel installation or powerful like early Buren. If you notice, Buren's initial Guggenheim intervention was still grappling with "large" in terms of minimalist scale as well as recognizing that "large" could mean challenging then-current institutional normativeness.

David H said...

The cave of Lascaux