FALL
2007 HONORS COURSES
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]
