Institutional Blessing: The Museum as Canon-Maker

Abstract

With characteristic acuity, Marx Wartofsky once dispatched George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art by declaring it neither institutional nor a theory. Aestheticians, while commonly absorbed with theory, rarely have much to do with the actual institutions of the art world.¹ I propose here to discuss one institution, the Museum, which, since the eighteenth century, has figured prominently in constituting the art world. I hold that the museum plays a major part in defining art and in evaluating it; that its institutional role is indeed culturally linked with the determination of what will count as art and, contingently, what is to be celebrated and preserved. As institutions, museums are mandated to collect and preserve objects identified as having a certain cultural value.² As social institutions, moreover, they depersonalize the judgment of value that they make, rendering it both public and normative. Museums purport not to be expressive of private tastes, but to be archivally retentive of objective value and to serve as legitimate celebrants of items of indubitable (if not universally acknowledged) merit.³ Museums are thus implicated in the dissemination of cultural canons and, I contend, as well of their formation.

This article has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society under the “Philosophical Reflections on the Museum as Canon Maker” and now in press