On the museum's ruins: A critical theory of postmodernism.
Item
-
Title
-
On the museum's ruins: A critical theory of postmodernism.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9432336
-
identifier
-
9432336
-
Creator
-
Crimp, J. Douglas.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Rosemarie Bletter
-
Date
-
1994
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Art History
-
Abstract
-
On the Museum's Ruins constructs a theory of postmodernism in the visual arts through a series of critical interventions in debates about the art of the 1980s. The central thesis holds that the art museum faced an epistemological and material crisis beginning in the 1960s as the tenets of modernism began to be criticized and displaced. The practices of Robert Rauschenberg, Daniel Buren, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Hans Haacke, Richard Serra, and Marcel Broodthaers, among others, are analyzed for the critiques they make, implicit or explicit, of art-as-institution.;I argue first that the embrace of photography by the museum as an art form among others destroyed the coherence of modernism and of the modern artwork's progressive removal from social practices. This in turn brought into question the primacy of painting and sculpture as quintessential museum arts.;The second part of the dissertation addresses site-specificity, initiated with minimal art and later radicalized through an inclusion of the social specificity of the sites of art, especially public art.;Finally, in part three, I undertake an archeological investigation of the ways in which the art museum constructs a history of art. This is accomplished through an analysis of contemporary exhibitions, reinstallations of permanent collections, newly constructed museum buildings--all in relation to both the history of museums and to current art practices that resist the museum's conflict-free cultural history.;In total, the transformations of recent art practices, discourses, and institutions reveal what must be understood as a new epistemology of art now recognized as postmodern.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
