Welcome to Art 272 at CUA
The museum is dead, long live the museum. Paradoxical as it might sound, the modern
museum remains trapped between two contradictory modes of existence. On the one
hand, the museum, as an institution, has come to represent the covert hierarchies of
value within a culture or society. In his book, Twilight Memories: making time in a
culture of amnesia (1994), Andreas Huyssen argued that the museum is “a key
paradigm of contemporary cultural activities.” Huyssen recognized that modern
audiences, in fact, set the expectations of the museum in their “looking for emphatic
experiences, instant illumination, stellar events, and blockbuster shows rather than
serious and meticulous appropriation of cultural knowledge.” On the other hand, the
museum demonstrates a type of cultural ossification where objects, artworks, and
material culture are sealed up and removed from our direct engagement. We see
paintings under thick glass, observe manuscripts trapped beneath cases, and cautiously
move around barriers or stanchions that limit our access to sculptures or decorative
arts. This follows the critique made by many modern philosophers—Foucault called the
museum a type of ‘heterotopia cemetery,’ Theodore Adorno labeled it a ‘sepulcher’ and
Maurice Merlau-Ponty went the furthest, besmirching it as a ‘meditative necropolis’ for
‘the historicity of death.’ Given these poles, the challenge that a museum and its
curators face is how to revive collections so that newer audiences raised in a digital
ecosphere are willing to engage with objects on a personal level, thus finding value in
an experience that resists a type of apathy Adorno once proclaimed, “put the art of the
past to death!”
The CUA University Museum collection exemplifies an opportunity to showcase the
potential for a hybrid approach that directly challenges those critiques. Consisting of
over 5,000 pieces, the collection exists across the entire campus—paintings hung on
hallways we routinely pass, vases and plates that adorn tables, cabinets that sit in the
corners of offices, and even ivory triptychs that appear as zoom backgrounds.
Students in ART 272 (The Cosmopolitan Renaissance) have embarked on an object-based art
history research project that begins with a deep engagement, slow looking, and critical
analysis of 11 art objects from the early modern period (1300-1600). Working with Maria
Mazzenga (Museum Curator), Shane MacDonald (Special Collections Archivist) and
William J. Shepherd (University Archivist and Head of Special Collections), students
participated in the rare opportunity to examine the object files and develop an analysis
based on historical context, represented subject matter, and formal style. The questions
posed to each student were simple: what does the provenance history tell us about the
object, and what research can/should be done on this object? Their research was
written in the format of blog posts and Instagram stories, thereby demonstrating that
scholarly engagement is, in fact, possible with newer media. Our poster documents their
journey—starting with initial questions about the object, charting their research,
reflections on their evolving ideas, and final conclusions. The culmination of our course
will be a digital exhibition, tentatively titled: Hidden in Plain Sight.