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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2016
This chapter first analyzes two texts in the tradition of essays which associate museums with the notion of displacement: Moral Considerations on the Destination of Works of Art, by Quatremère de Quincy, and ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, by Heidegger. Both authors claim that a work of art is not only a material object but also a centre of practices, values, beliefs, traditions, memories, and so on. I argue that, insofar as a work of art can be the centre of this type of network in a museum, the description of art these authors propose defeats their own claims against museums. In the second part, I suggest that Heidegger's and Quatremère's descriptions of the role of art can be articulated with the help of Donald Davidson's understanding of the interconnection between the material world and human concepts. As Davidson sees it, things and people can only be described in relation to the other particular persons, objects, events and places they are connected to. From this perspective, the subjective, the objective and the intersubjective cannot be grasped independently. Museums stage this interconnection and can, therefore, be regarded as philosophical instruments that may help us describe things and, by extension, also ourselves.
1 de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysotome Quatremère, Considérations Morales sur la Destination des Ouvrages d'Art (Paris: L'Imprimerie de Crapelet, 1815)Google Scholar. Since there is no available English version of this essay, every translation is mine. Another example is the famous essay ‘The Problem of Museums’ (1923), by Paul Valéry, a text which, even though it was written a century later, recovers the most important points of the first essay, suggesting that museum-goers were still as uncomfortable in the museological space as the first museum visitors.
2 ‘Le public perd de vue, au milieu de ces collections, les causes qui firent naître les ouvrages, les rapports auxquels ils étaient soumis, les affections avec lesquelles ils demanderaient à être considerés, et cette multitude d'idées morales, d'harmonies intellectuelles qui leur donnaient tant de moyens divers d'agir sur notre âme’. Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations Morales sur la Destination des Ouvrages d'Art, op. cit., 50.
3 de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysotome Quatremère, Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens, translated by Miller, Chris and Gilks, David (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2012)Google Scholar. The letters were first published in 1818. Note that the display of the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum that Quatremère de Quincy refers to is different from the current one in the Duveen Gallery. The Duveen Gallery was inaugurated in 1962. Quatremère visited the Parthenon Marbles in 1818, when the pieces were in a temporary room at the old British Museum in Montague House. At that time the Marbles shared that space with other antiquities from different origins, such as the caryatid from the porch of the Erechtheion. No effort was made to recapture the original placement of the sculptures of the Parthenon. These weren't even isolated from the rest of the collection. This display aimed to provide a ‘picturesque’ arrangement and an inspiring atmosphere for artists to draw. Before the construction of the Duveen Gallery, the Parthenon Marbles were displayed in several different arrangements, according to the various understandings of the museum's role in presenting them.
4 Ibid., 137.
5 For more information about the history of the Parthenon and the controversy surrounding the Parthenon Marbles, see: St. Clair, William, Lord Elgin and the Marbles (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Beard, Mary, The Parthenon (London: Profile Books, 2010)Google Scholar; and Hitchens, Christopher, The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification (London and New York: Verso, 2008)Google Scholar.
6 Déotte, Jean-Louis, Oubliez! Les Ruines, l'Europe, le Musée (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994)Google Scholar.
7 Quatremère de Quincy, Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens, op. cit., 117.
8 Ibid.
9 Quatremère notes that only if Raphael's works could be seen side by side, would they truly be known: ‘These isolated pieces, detached from the series of which they form part, cannot have the same pedagogic quality that they had in their country of origin’. Ibid., 113. Ideally, this collection would include the entire work of an artist, so that artists could learn about the progress of artistic skill through the comparison between the several stages of an artist's work.
10 Ibid., 129.
11 Ibid., 137.
12 Ibid.
13 ‘[les Arts] sont destinés à exciter d'heureuses idées, à rappeler de touchants souvenirs, à consacrer d'importants opinions, à perpétuer, à propager de nobles sentiments et de hautes affections, la societé et la philosophie en proclament l'utilité, en réclament le libre et public usage. Aux yeux du vrai philosophe, les Arts sont les historiens populaires d'un grand nombre de faits, d'opinions, de traditions, qui composent l'existence morale des nations’. Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations Morales sur la Destination des Ouvrages d'Art, op. cit., 55.
14 Using Ancient Greece as a paradigm of harmonious life, Quatremère notes that in this period the arts were naturally connected to the needs of society insofar as every social, political and religious institutions was grounded on and consolidated by the arts: ‘Dans les campagnes, dans les villes, dans les places, dans les maisons, dans les routes, tout vivait, tout respirait, tout pensait par la puissance de l'art …. Chaque pas offrait un monument, et chaque monument donnait une leçon, retraçait un souvenir, excitait un sentiment; c'est que chacun avait ses fondements dans les moeurs, les habitudes du lieu, l'histoire du pays, les traditions locales’. Ibid., 80–81.
15 Quatremère de Quincy, Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens, op. cit., 137.
16 Heidegger, Martin, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Heidegger, Martin, Poetry, Language Thought, translated by Hofstadter, Albert (New York: HarperPerennial, 2001), 15–86 Google Scholar.
17 ‘[E]ven the much-vaunted aesthetic experience cannot get around the thingly aspect of the art work. There is something stony in a work of architecture, wooden in a carving, colored in a painting, spoken in a linguistic work, sonorous in a musical composition…. [T]he work of art is something else over and above the thingly element’. Ibid., 19.
18 Ibid., 41.
19 Ibid., 42.
20 Ibid., 33. Heidegger further remarks that, even though this description is suggested by Van Gogh's picture, it is through the peasant woman wearing her shoes in the field that the shoes are what they are, but ‘perhaps it is only in the picture that we notice all this about the shoes’. Ibid.
21 Schapiro, Meyer, ‘The Still-Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh’, in Schapiro, Meyer, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1994)Google Scholar.
22 Heidegger gives the example of a block of granite to clarify what he means by a mere thing. See Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, op. cit., 22.
23 ‘A piece of equipment, a pair of shoes for instance, when finished, is also self-contained like the mere things, but it doesn't have the character of having taken shape by itself, like the granite boulder. On the other hand, equipment displays an affinity with the artwork insofar as it is something produced by the human hand. However, by its self-sufficient presence the work of art is similar rather to the mere thing which has taken shape by itself and is self-contained.… [T]hus the piece of equipment is half thing, because characterized by thingliness, and yet it is something more: at the same time it is half art work and yet something less, because lacking the self-sufficiency of the art work.’ Ibid., 28.
24 Malpas, Jeff, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 138–156 Google Scholar.
25 Davidson, Donald, ‘Three Varieties of Knowledge’, in Griffiths, A. Phillips (ed), A.J. Ayer Memorial Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 153–166 Google Scholar; see especially 165.
26 Ibid., 159.
27 Davidson describes works of art as objects: ‘Works of art, writings, artifacts of all sorts are among the objects in the world’. Davidson, Donald, ‘The Third Man’, Critical Inquiry 19 (1995), 607–615 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 This is the same thing Heidegger suggests when he says that ‘[the temple gives] men their outlook on themselves’. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, op. cit., 42.
29 Ibid., 40.
30 Ibid., 66.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Mary Beard writes: ‘the unquenchable controversy has had one very clear effect. It has helped to keep the Parthenon at the very top of our cultural agenda…. The Parthenon belongs … to that elite band of monuments whose historical significance is overlaid by the fame of being famous. When we visit it in Athens or in the British Museum, we're not only searching out a masterpiece of classical Greece; there are, after all, a good number of classical temples bigger or better preserved than this that never attracted our attention…. We're visiting a monument that has been fought over for generations…. The uncomfortable conclusion is hard to resist: that, if it hadn't been dismembered, the Parthenon would never have been half so famous’. Mary Beard, The Parthenon, op. cit., 22.
34 Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that they are not an important part of Greek culture; I'm just suggesting that this description is incomplete.
35 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, op. cit., 40.
36 I am drawing on Didier Maleuvre's argument that anachronism is the essence of works of art. See his Museum Memories: History, Technology Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 58–60 Google Scholar.
37 See Malpas, Jeff, Heidegger's Topology: Being Place, World (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2006)Google Scholar, especially chapter 5.
38 Fisher, Philip, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 18–19 Google Scholar.
39 Ibid., 95.
40 Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Valéry Proust Museum’, in Adorno, Theodor W., Prisms, translated by Samuel, and Weber, Sherry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 175–185 Google Scholar.