Events & Programs

Thinking Museums: Old Masters and New Priorities
Scholar Symposium at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
October 24-26, 2008
Program

Friday, October 24, 2008

SESSION 1: Questions of Placement

Main Gallery

Discussion Leader: Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)IMG_19121.JPG

  • Giles Waterfield (Attingham Summer School and Royal Collection Studies, London) "Historical Placement and Museum Narration"
  • Kulapat Yantrasast (wHY Architecture, Culver City) "Thinking About the Museum as a Ceremonial Space"
  • Matthias Waschek (Director, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts) "Displacements"

SESSION 2: Dealing with the Legacy of Old Masters

Cube Gallery

Discussion leader: Jim Wood (The J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles)

  • Thomas W. Lentz (Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge) "Museums and the Issue of Legacy"
  • Stephan Wolohojian (Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge) "Juxtpositions"
  • Stephanie Wiles (Oberlin College) "Legacies of a Collection"

Sunday, October 26, 2008

SESSION 3: Old Masters and Their Audience

Chair: Mark Ledbury (The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown) IMG_1931_1.JPG

Discussions Leaders: Michael Conforti (The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown), Eik Kahng (The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore), and Joseph Rishel (The Philadelphia Museum of Art)

  • Intimate experience and mass experience
  • Old Masters priorities: preserving "specialness" vs. pedagogical and public access
  • "Domestic" vs. "white cube"–impact of modern and contemporary art spaces on redesigns of "Old Master collection spaces."
  • Who should be targeted, and how?
  • Do old master collections need to justify themselves? What constitutes "relevance"?

SESSION 4: Scholarship and the Collection

Chair: Michael Ann Holly (The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown)

Discussion Leaders: Jim Wood, Richard Rand (The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown) and Martha Ward (University of Chicago)

  • Who does it, why, how, who cares? (The future of collection catalogues; is scholarship entirely provoked by exhibitions these days? What counts as scholarship, etc.?)
  • How does the world of academic art history, and scholarship more broadly, give old masters new contexts?
  • How do collections "form" scholarship? Do they? Or does scholarship form collections?
  • How has museological scholarship (of which there has been a flood in the past twenty years) shaped practice in museums (if at all)?
  • The Exhibition vs. The Collection: tensions and serendipities. Will the permanent collection always be in the shadow of the exhibition in the new media and cultural tourism age?
  • What is the place and nature of the curator in this new order?

Public Conversation

This is a question and answer session in front of a small public drawn from graduate students and Clark Art Institute members.

For more photos from this symposium, visit the Pulitzer's Flickr page.