Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bruce Altshuler is Director of the Program in Museum Studies at New York University and former Director of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, New York. His books include The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century and Isamu Noguchi.

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"By bringing together such a diverse range of informed voices, this book wonderfully succeeds in suggesting not merely as theory, but with the nitty-gritty feel of reality the very specific considerations that a museum's staff must take into account in determining whether or not to acquire, whether by gift or purchase, any particular work of art. I know of no other English-language publication that has previously addressed this issue with comparable depth or breadth."--Stephen E. Weil, Scholar Emeritus, Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, author of Making Museums Matter

"Particularly well-organized and accessibly written, this book explores the collecting and preservation of contemporary art created in a wide range of media. Its variety of essays, especially those addressing different types of institutions and various spheres of ethnicity and region, provides a very rich, stimulating, and useful introduction to this important topic."--Jeffrey Abt, Wayne State University

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Collecting the New

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

Bruce Altshuler DIRECTOR, PROGRAM IN MUSEUM STUDIES, GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCE, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

The collecting and preserving of objects has traditionally been marked as a-if not the-central function of the museum, but discussion of museums and contemporary art has focused almost entirely on issues of display and exhibition. This is not surprising, as exhibitions are the public face of the museum, being the primary attraction for visitors and the central object of attention in the press and in the academy. But the collecting of contemporary art by museums raises a wide range of issues, from challenges to the traditional conception of the art museum to practical questions relating to the changing character of contemporary art itself. The purpose of this volume is to investigate these concerns, and to do so from the standpoint of those who deal with them in the course of active museum work. To set the stage, it will be useful to look at some of the critical moments in the history of, and conceptual tensions occasioned by, museum collecting of contemporary art.

Gertrude Stein reportedly observed that something could either be modern or it could be a museum, but it could not be both. Stein's remark points to a dilemma central to the museum's engagement with contemporary art: since the eighteenth century the traditional view of the art museum has been that it is an institution intended to preserve and display works that have withstood the test of time. Given the fallibility of aesthetic judgment, this has seemed the most reliable way to identify artistic quality. Thus the validation that artists and contemporary collectors seek from the display of their works in museums is based on the association of the museum with the time-tested masterpiece, a normative connection grounded in a convergence of historical opinion that seems to rule out the new.

Of course, curators make qualitative judgments all of the time-about new works as well as about old-but such assessment implicitly is done in the subjunctive mode. To designate artworks as museum-worthy is to mark them as objects that would deserve a particular place in what Philip Fisher has called "the future's past." This past is that of art history, whether viewed as a linear narrative or, in tune with recent directions of inquiry, as a more variegated story. Contemporary works valorized by entering museum collections-and, to a lesser extent, by being exhibited in museums-are in a sense projected into the future, identified as playing a role in an anticipated history. This same kind of projection also connects with the art market for contemporary works, for putting a price on a recent work of art in part is to place a bet on how important this work will be in the art historical future. These two aspects of anticipating the art historical future are closely related, and in fact they are two sides of the same coin. A familiar example is the influence of Clement Greenberg during the 1950s and '60s, when his critical writing and art world activity guided contemporary acquisitions by both American museums and private collectors. During this period Greenberg's view of artistic progress yielded expectations of future art historical significance, which in turn determined judgments of both museum-worthiness and market value.

The connection between art history and the art museum makes the collecting of contemporary works just as much a matter of guesswork as are dealers' prices, and equally problematic. In addition to general skepticism concerning aesthetic judgment of the new, the pedagogical function of the museum-established in the eighteenth century alongside its moral purpose of developing taste through exposure to exemplary artworks-required that works brought into an institutional collection be located within a fixed art historical narrative. It is this narrative that was to be taught to visitors, making the museum, as Christian Mechel wrote in his 1781 catalog for the Habsburg imperial collection that he had installed in the Belvedere in Vienna, "a visible history of art." Especially in the modern period, when artists pushed the boundary of what counts as a work of art-certainly one source of Stein's difficulty in conjoining "museum" and "modern"-problems of historical anticipation were pronounced. And with recent resistance to the modernist story of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century art, as well as the proliferation of alternative narratives and artistic practices, the very enterprise of constructing definitive accounts that situate new acquisitions in terms of historical place and importance has been called into question. So throughout the history of the museum, arguments have been available to steer the institution away from the art of its time.

Such reluctance, however, generally has existed alongside a fervent desire to embrace the new. The museum as exemplar of civic pride and national heritage was established in eighteenth-century France and promulgated by the French. Initiated by the transformation of the Louvre in Paris into a museum and its opening as a public institution in 1793 after the Revolution, the conception of the public museum spread throughout Europe. With the nation's artistic patrimony expanded through the confiscation of works from the aristocracy and the Church-and by Napoleon's looting of the Continent's artistic treasures-museums were created in other French cities, and a number of important European museums were established in the early years of the nineteenth century in territories occupied by Napoleonic forces. Although their primary displays were of works of the past, a rising sense of national identity often resulted in the exhibition of local artists, such as the room of contemporary paintings by Goya and other Spaniards that led toward the central gallery at the opening of the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. Such nationalism influenced the creation in the latter half of the nineteenth century of many public institutions dedicated to the display of contemporary art, from London's Gallery of British Art to Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery, and here the precedent also was French.

In Paris in 1818, with the Louvre reserved for the masterpieces of the past, a place was made for contemporary French art when the Palais du Luxembourg was converted into a public museum, the Muse des Artistes Vivants (Museum of Living Artists). (The name would be adapted by A.E. Gallatin when he established one of the first modern art museums in the United States at New York University in 1927, the Gallery of Living Art.) With works by important French artists passing from the Luxembourg to the Louvre within five to ten years after the artists' deaths, room was freed in the Luxembourg for new art, and an institutional structure was created for an ongoing state commitment to the collecting and display of contemporary work. This commitment soon was expressed by large-scale state purchase of paintings at the annual Salons, works bought for the Luxembourg and, increasingly, for the expanding system of provincial museums. But it is important to note that these state purchases were primarily of academic art, and that "the new painting" would largely be excluded. Only in 1896 did a significant number of important Impressionist works enter the Luxembourg, after a compromise was reached allowing the museum to accept a portion of Gustave Caillebotte's controversial bequest...