imaginary museum

The imaginary museum in which the art of every age is at last brought together and searched for its deepest meaning…

Andre Malraux’s great study of “anti-destiny” was titled The Metamorphosis of the Gods. The book, was in a sense, a continuation of The Voices of Silence. But it is also a self-contained work and a fresh beginning. Most of the basic ideas contained in this book can be found in the earlier one, but there they are scattered amid a staggeing profusion of sights and insights. In The Metamorphosis of the Gods, Malraux pulled together a number of these insights- chiefly those concerning art as an expression of the otherworldly- and arranged them in what, for him, was almost considered order.

—Andre Malraux’s Museum without Walls, 1947 —Image:http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit4-14-4.asp

Malraux’s resulting work was breath-taking, irritating, beautifully but densely written, repetitious, humorless, fascinating, and unquestionably brilliant. Every page glows with a rare passion for art- and, considering the author’s agnosticism, it displays a longing sensitivity and an almost professional knowledgeability about religion. As the title accurately suggests, it is concerned with the changing shapes of faith at least as much as with the changing shapes of art.

The setting is still the Imaginary Museum, or, as it is also known, the Museum without Walls. By this concept, as he explained at length in The Voices of Silence, Malraux refers to the fact that, thanks to photography and modern reproduction techniques,humankind can for the first time have all the world’s art before its eyes. The spectator is no longer limited to isolated masterpieces or to truncated museum collections assembled by chance. They can see art as it has never been seen before, not only in all its vastness, but in all its detail: for lens and light can show people, larger than life, the remotest corners of otherwise inaccessible facades, the faintest smiles on otherwise invisible faces.

ADDENDUM:


(see link at end)…In Postmodernism what Andr Malraux called the global “museum without walls” has been realized, resulting in the unlimited expansion of the contemporary. The radical pluralism that prevails in the museum without walls has made a mockery of the belief that there is one art that is more “historical” than any other. Thus history has become as absurd and idiosyncratic as the contemporary. ( Donald Kuspit) Read More:http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit4-14-05.asp

 

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