SEMINARS SPRING 2008
HONR 209E Attending the Blockbuster: Understanding the Cultural
Impact of Temporary Exhibitions
Monday/Wednesday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Dr. Quint Gregory, Lecturer in University Honors
Next time you go to a big show at the National Gallery of Art or Smithsonian, ask yourself: Do museums just show, or do they shape? Are you seeing unvarnished objectivity, or have certain assumptions influenced the presentation of what you see? Does it matter? The temporary exhibition is arguably a museum's best means for attracting new visitors. It is a powerful vehicle for illuminating historical moments or exploring themes of profound spirit and beauty in art. The exhibition is also a form that, increasingly, is the raison d’etre of many museums. Powerful tensions between scholarship and mass appeal constantly threaten the integrity of the exhibition concept.
But not always. In the late Fall 1995 a small group of paintings by the then relatively unknown Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer opened for a 3 month viewing at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Though eagerly anticipated for some time by a small but passionate group of art lovers, the show quickly became a must-attend event for hundreds of thousands. A well-oiled publicity apparatus, receptive media, and a government shutdown of federal buildings coalesced to intensify the already fever-pitched interest in this "once in several lifetimes event."
How diametrically opposite was the experience of curators at the Air and Space Museum just across the Mall from the National Gallery of Art when their plans for an exhibition of the Enola Gay and its legacy as the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb in wartime encountered not an eager public but fiercely determined opposition from a few well-organized groups. Skillfully employing the press and congressional committees, these groups succeeded in carving up the script, reducing the exhibition's scope before it opened. That the exhibition went on to be, in the words of one group's web site, "one of the most popular in the museum's history" masks the fact that this near record-setting crowd missed important facets of the Enola Gay's story. In this case the long-term interest in historical accuracy succumbed to the short-term intense political pressure to avoid a morally complex and politically delicate moment in the U.S.'s history.
The goals of this course are to understand the exhibition as a form of communication and to be aware of the forces that shape it and, at the same time, of the visitor's experience. It is hoped that by critically considering selected historical examples and contemporary reviews of them, and by visiting current exhibitions and meeting with curators, students in this course will become discerning consumers of this peculiar mode of communication, understanding it as a dynamic that can drive cultural change and advance lofty ideals but also one that is malleable to external pressures that can distort its pure goal.
Course requirements: lively discussion (and debate!) of course readings; preparation of an oral critique of a current exhibition, which the student will transform into a written review (4-5 pages); and a thoughtful proposal (5-8 pages) for an exhibition that interests the student.
Readings:
Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of Enola Gay
Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity
and Diversity in a Changing World
CORE: History or Theory of the Arts [HA]
