Quotes dealing with our project

Many of these quotes were provided by Kevin who researched a lot about the concept of our piece.


“life in a museum is like making love in a cemetery”- alan kaprow

"The museum's history was written much like art's, as a continuous evolution from ancient times."

"What is at issue is the contemporary art of exhibition: the construction of new museums and the expansion and reorganization of existing ones to create a conflict-free representation of art history, and, concurrently,
the effacement or co-optation of current adversary art practices.

from Bürger: "The concept'art as an institution'...refers to the productive and distributive apparatus and also to ideas about art that prevail at a given time and that determine the reception of works.  The avant-garde turns against both- the distribution apparatus on which the work of art depends, and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept of autonomy.  Only after art, in the nineteenth-century Aestheticism, has altogether detached itself from the praxis of life can the aesthetic develop 'purely.'  But the other side of autonomy, art;s lack of social impact, also becomes recognizable.  The avant-gardist protest, whose aim it is to reintegrate art into the praxis of life, reveals the nexus between autonomy and he absence of any consequences."...............Bürger locates the failure of the avant-garde in its inability to return art to social purpose and furthermore sees this failure as determined by the continuation of bourgeois hegemony........what Bürger referred to as changes at the level of the contents of individual works and changes in the way art functions in society.  The former trend includes traditional artworks that take AID as subject matter- paintings, plays, novels, poems "about" AIDS; the latter consists of cultural participation in activist politics, most often using agitprop grapics and documentary video.  uch works eludes the museum, not because it is never shown there but because it is made outside the institution's compass.  Arising out of a collective movement, AIDS activist art practices articulate, actualy produce, the politics of that movement.  Often anonymously and collectively made; appropriating techniques of "high art," popular culture, and mass advertising, aimed at and constituitve of specific constituencies; releveant only to local and transistory circumstances; useless for preservation and posterity- is this art not an example of the "sublation of art into the praxis of life"?

"Contemporary art's critique of the museum and the modern aesthetic it produces still "belongs" to the museum"
The German word museal(museumlike) has unpleasant overtones.  It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying.  They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present.  Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association.  Museums are the family sepulchers of works of art. - Theodore W. Adorno, "Valery Proust Museu

These quotes to me are relevant to our second assignment because of the relation they have to our views on the gallery and the exchange of art. Many of these quotes deal with the desire for the art gallery/ museum to evolve from where it is at, to vary from the elitist control it has and to embrace art of everyone instead of a select few.