Accompanying an exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, this book is the most comprehensive catalogue on the work of this internationally recognized architectural firm.

Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov consider how rapture resonate's both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being.

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the (...) summer of 2000, evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

Catalogue of the Cleveland Museum of Art's photographic holdings.

Epic Tales from Ancient India: Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art. Edited by Marika Sardar. San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2016. Pp. 164. $45. [Distr. by Yale Univ. Press.].

This two‐part article examines the very limited engagement by philosophers with museums, and proposes analysis under six headings: cultural variety, taxonomy, and epistemology in Part I, and teleology, ethics, and therapeutics and aesthetics in Part II. The article establishes that fundamental categories of museums established in the 19th century – of art, of anthropology, of history, of natural history, of science and technology – still persist. Among them, it distinguishes between hegemonic (predominantly Western) and subaltern (minority or Indigenous) museums worldwide. (...) It argues that relations between hegemonic and subaltern museums are often agonistic, and are compromised by claims of universalism on the part of proponents of the former. The article observes that most discussion of museums focuses exclusively and misleadingly on their public exhibition function, and contends that scholarship – not exhibition – is central to all museums. However, that predominantly taxonomic scholarship, while innovative and central to a dominant epistemology based on the observation of tangible things in the 19th century, was compromised by the epistemic shift to abstraction and experimentation in the 20th, which resulted in a loss of initiative and authority. Although epistemological changes currently in progress favor a renewed attention to tangible things as complex matrices to which museums ought to contribute significantly, the fundamental taxonomy of museums by collection type is a clog on the ability of museum scholars to engage with and themselves produce big ideas. In order to function well as sites of scholarship in the future, museums will have to be far more adaptable and attentive to a wider range of things and ideas (including Indigenous ideas incompatible with Western assumptions) than their existing collection divisions permit. (shrink)

The standing screens on the title is the oldest work extant of KANO Motonobu's work as folding screens of thick colored flowers and birds with golden background. This thesis designates that the scenery and the motif of the work are in correspondence with both descriptions of the scenery of Pure Land in several Buddhist scriptures and the design of actual gardens. Firstly, a peacock on the right hand screen is focused to indicate the bird connotes the elements of auspicious birds (...) in Buddhism, such as Mahamayuri and Kalavinka.Secondly, the elements of the scenery in the work, such as the four seasons at the same time ∼ the depiction of perpetuity ∼ and the existence of a pond, are identified with the description of Pure Land in Kwan-mu-liang-shou-ching and Ta-wuliang-shou-ching. These elements of the garden in the work are placed similarly to the Pure Land style gardens, which are illustrated in "Center and Surrounds of Kyoto" 's. In consideration of the above factors, the conclusion that, in the work, KANO Motonobu succeeded to portray the ideal garden by combining the scenery of Pure Land and that of actual gardens, is drawn. (shrink)

Die alphabetische Reihung der Autorennamen erweckt ein irreführendes Bild der einzelnen Kontributionen, zumal da ja auch kein Vorwort erscheint. Die wissenschaftliche Leitung und Letztverantwortung für den Band lag weiterhin bei N. Oikonomides, der nicht nur das Manuskript abschloss, sondern auch noch die Stellungnahmen der Begutachter auswerten konnte, Fahnen aber leider nicht mehr erleben durfte. Den größten Zeitaufwand investierte sicherlich J. Nesbitt, der ja für dieses Projekt in Dumbarton Oaks angestellt ist. E. McGeer dagegen ist zwar ein sigillographischer Hoffnungsträger in Amerika, (...) sein Beitrag zu diesem Band war aber noch eher bescheiden. (shrink)

This article aims to defend the value of art museum audio guides. Modern guides have many functions, but I will focus on two that pertain directly to art appreciation. First, audio guides offer tours that direct visitors' attention to museum highlights. Second, they have individual stops that offer commentary and criticism about individual works of art. I will concede that the tours do not serve the interests of all visitors. However, I will defend the merits of the individual (...) stops. In particular, I will argue that they provide information about the associated works that it would be difficult for us to learn just by looking at them for ourselves. In so doing, the guides put us in a better position to appreciate the works. Crucially, this benefit obtains even if art appreciation turns out to be subjective, must be undertaken autonomously, or has to be grounded in empirical observation. (shrink)

In keeping with the general theme of the General Assembly of CIPSH in Beijing, 2004, in this article I emphasize the potential of the internet to impact the use of works of art in public and private museums for study and research, and for the publication of research. The possibility exists nowadays of creating a hyper-real ‘musée imaginaire’ or ‘museum without walls’ to use André Malraux's phrase of more than fifty years ago. It is hard to see how it (...) could be anything but a benefit to human knowledge to have images of all works in the public domain (that is, for which the creator's copyright has expired) available on the world wide web. Under US law this year (2006) that would mean all works created before 1911. There are encouraging developments in that direction, but there is also constant legal wrangling. And I have to admit there are sometimes two sides to the question, even if I think one argument is far stronger than the other. (shrink)

In this essay, I respond to Mary Beth Willard's commentary on Drawing the Line. I focus on responding to a number of questions and objections that Willard poses concerning the role of arts institutions in addressing the problem of immoral artists. Focusing on the case of museums in particular, I defend the idea that they can exercise their power to play a productive and important role in societal conversations about moral criticism of artists.

This clearly designed and illustrated book is dedicated to a complete overview of Richard Meier's Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, completed in 1995. Located in the area of the Casa de la Caritat, a former monastic enclave, this extraordinary building maintains a unique dialogue between the city's old urban fabric and the contemporary art housed within the museum. Barcelona's first institution devoted entirely to twentieth-century art, this museum synthesizes the striking contemporaneity of its bold architecture and the (...) rich medieval history of its context. Meier's masterful use of materials -- pristine white aluminum panels, glass, stucco, and granite -- and characteristic modern style emphasize a play of solid and void, light and shadow, through the museum's fluid, geometric forms. An external ramp leads from the sweeping plaza to a triple-height atrium space. An internal, glass-enclosed ramp unfolds vertically along the front facade of the building, offering breathtaking vistas of a sixteenth-century church and the romantic city beyond and leading to three floors of open exhibition areas. This unique publication documents the dramatic design with preliminary sketches, models, drawings, and lavish color photographs. (shrink)

This essay revisits Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes in order to raise the question of the dispute between art history and philosophy as a contest increasingly ceded to the claim of the expert and the hegemony of the museum as culture and as cult or coded signifier. Following a discussion of museum culture, I offer a hermeneutic and phenomenological reading of Heidegger’s ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ and (...) conclude by taking Heidegger’s discussion of the strife between earth and world to the site of the ancient temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae as an example of the insistent foreclosure of the ancient work of art and the conflicts of the pervasive efforts of modern conservation. (shrink)