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Comparative Approaches to the Study of National Museums

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Art Collections, Private and Public: A Comparative Legal Study

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Abstract

Difference in all its forms—cultural, temporal, geographical, and physical—is a central issue in museums [too] regardless of their nature—ethnographic, historical, artistic, archaeological, or scientific. Museums’ settings are different, because each one of them is formed in a specific society, in a specific culture.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “…, difference always shadows and doubles identity, always entails a relationship between self and other.”, see Sherman 2008, p. 1.

  2. 2.

    Dias 2008, p. 124.

  3. 3.

    Drengwitz and Elbers and Jahn and Wrogemann 2014, p. 98.

  4. 4.

    See McClellan 2008b, p. 25: “Needless to say, it is precisely the flattening of difference – differences of culture, class, and definitions of art across space and time – in a reductive pursuit if essential identities that recent critics of the museum have sought to explode as so many myths designed to occlude the power relations between peoples and between institutions and their publics”.

  5. 5.

    Aronsson 2008, p. 11. He points out that the “successive spread of the [cabinet of curiosity] model went, on a macro-historical scale and in accordance with regular models of colonialism and globalization, almost simultaneously to the white colonies in Charleston (1773), Rio de Janeiro (1815), Sydney (1821), Cape Town (1825)”.

  6. 6.

    Craik 2007, p. 37.

  7. 7.

    Aronsson 2011, pp. 30–31.

  8. 8.

    See Balachandran 2007, pp. 8–9, commenting on the looting and collecting of Chinese art objects by mosty Euro-Americans and on the arguments that Western museums were successively in time using for appropriating them, in order to “preserve” them: “First, they were identified as scientific institutions with specialists capable of properly cataloging, studying, and analyzing the material. Next, they were proposed as safe and secure repositories for artifacts. Finally, it was assumed that artifacts could be better appreciated for their intrinsic artistic, cultural, and historic significance by Western museum audiences rather than in their home countries where they were little valued”.

  9. 9.

    It is an institution based on the principles of the Enlightenment, the program of which, in regard of art, was to render it public, contrary to what was happening until then with the royal collections. Ever since then, one can no more define the people who visit museums, they are no more a community of people with an sacred art axis, see Moustaira 2007, p. 387.

  10. 10.

    This is one of the reasons for which most of the objects presented in museums and expositions had not been created to be exposed. It is a “forced spectacularisation” of objects withdrawn from their context, see Rossignol 2009, p. 30.

  11. 11.

    McClellan 2008a, p. 5.

  12. 12.

    Déotte 2001, p. 14.

  13. 13.

    Strinati 2008, p. 11.

  14. 14.

    See Heidegger 2003 (1960), p. 30: “Im Werk der Kunst hat sich die Wahrheit des Seienden ins Werk gesetzt”.

  15. 15.

    Marion 2007, p. 60.

  16. 16.

    Heidegger 2003 (1960), p. 35: “So stehen und hängen denn die Werke selbst in den Sammlungen und Ausstellungen. Aber sind sie hier an sich als die Werke, die sie selbst sind, oder sind sie eher als die Gegenstände des Kunstbetriebes?”.

  17. 17.

    Puelles Romero 2011, p. 61, notes that the Museum and the Art Critique are two realms of knowledge and of sensibility that were borne in the 18th century and that during the posterior centuries acted and continue to act as institutional representatives of knowledge and power, as two factors that intervene in the modeling of the spectators´ sensibility.

  18. 18.

    Morbidelli 2010, p. 5.

  19. 19.

    Aronsson 2008, pp. 8–9.

  20. 20.

    Aronsson and Elgenius 2011, pp. 5–6.

  21. 21.

    Aronsson and Elgenius 2011, pp. 15–16.

  22. 22.

    Laureano 2014, p. 49.

  23. 23.

    See infra, 6.5.

  24. 24.

    Stampa 2007, p. 21.

  25. 25.

    Fumaroli 1994, p. 5.

  26. 26.

    Fatôme 1994, p. 15.

  27. 27.

    Yudice 2010, pp. 32–33.

  28. 28.

    Moustaira 2012, p. 71.

  29. 29.

    Moser 2010, p. 22.

  30. 30.

    Vicenti Carpio 2006, p. 620.

  31. 31.

    Tsosie 2009, p. 3.

  32. 32.

    King 2009, p. 25.

  33. 33.

    According to Shyllon 2009, p. 159, the foundation of museums in Africa could have impeded or diminished the “whole-sale” removal of cultural objects from the colonies to the Western metropolises.

  34. 34.

    King 2009, p. 25.

  35. 35.

    Bergeron 2009–2010, p. 60.

  36. 36.

    “No se erigen, no deben erigirse los museos de las naciones, ni sostenerse por el Erario, únicamente para que el alumno o el aficionado utilice lienzos y estatuas ejercitándose en copiarlas. Con ser este fin muy legítimo, tiene el Museo, desde luego, otro más elevado, humano y patriótico: el señalar los términos por donde llegó el trabajo del hombre y la cultura nacional, en una faz principalísima, a la decadencia o prosperidad en que se la contempla siendo este raciocinio exacto, el Museo se halla incluido dentro de la órbita de las instituciones docentes, cuya existencia interesa a todos y cada uno de los españoles”, F.M. Tubino, Crítica artística. El Museo del Prado, La Academia de Bellas Artes y el catálogo del señor Madrazo, Revista de España 1872, pp. 513–514: it is referred by Gutiérrez Burón 2013, p. 189.

  37. 37.

    Fincham 2011, p. 9.

  38. 38.

    Bergeron 2009–2010, p. 60.

  39. 39.

    Renier 2013, p. 121.

  40. 40.

    Renier 2013, p. 122.

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  1. Faculty of Law, University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Elina Moustaira

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Moustaira, E. (2015). Comparative Approaches to the Study of National Museums. In: Art Collections, Private and Public: A Comparative Legal Study. SpringerBriefs in Law. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15802-0_4

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