Collecting the new Altshuler, Bruce; Altshuler, Bruce
2013., 20131024, 2013, 2005, 2006-01-01
eBook
Collecting the Newis the first book on the questions and challenges that museums face in acquiring and preserving contemporary art. Because such art has not yet withstood the test of time, it defies ...the traditional understanding of the art museum as an institution that collects and displays works of long-established aesthetic and historical value. By acquiring such art, museums gamble on the future. In addition, new technologies and alternative conceptions of the artwork have created special problems of conservation, while social, political, and aesthetic changes have generated new categories of works to be collected.
Following Bruce Altshuler's introduction on the European and American history of museum collecting of art by living artists, the book comprises newly commissioned essays by twelve distinguished curators representing a wide range of museums. First considered are general issues including the acquisition process, and collecting by universal survey museums and museums that focus on modern and contemporary art. Following are groups of essays that address collecting in particular media, including prints and drawings, new (digital) media, and film and video; and national- and ethnic-specific collecting (contemporary art from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and African-American art). The closing essay examines the conservation problems created by contemporary works--for example, what is to be done when deterioration is the artist's intent?
The contributors are Christophe Cherix, Vishakha N. Desai, Steve Dietz, Howard N. Fox, Chrissie Iles and Henriette Huldisch, Pamela McClusky, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Lowery Stokes Sims, Robert Storr, Jeffrey Weiss, and Glenn Wharton.
Collecting the New Altshuler, Bruce
Collecting the New,
10/2013
Book Chapter
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.¹ 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
Thank you, Julie. Because we have such a diverse and wonderful panel here tonight, and because I'm here with five dancers from the Martha Graham Dance Company, I really don't feel that I need to do ...much more than provide the visual aids for this discussion.* And I would like to start with some dancing.
EXHIBITIONS TAKE CENTER STAGE Altshuler, Bruce
Art in America (1939),
06/2013, Letnik:
101, Številka:
6
Magazine Article
One of the most ambitious events accompanying this year's Venice Biennale is a restaging of a major exhibition from 1969, "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form; ...Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information." Originally mounted by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern, the show has now been reinstalled, more than four decades later, by curator Germano Celant with artist Thomas Demand and architect Rem Koolhaas at Ca' Corner della Regina in Venice under the aegis of the Fondazione Prada. Reportedly, every effort has been made to configure exactly the same works in exactly the same way, though in a very different space: an 18th-century palazzo rather a modernist kunsthalle. Here, Altshuler examines the importance of historical exhibitions to contemporary art and discusses the efforts and expenses devoted to exhuming a show from the past.
