In “Sacrality and Aura in the Museum: Mute Objects and Articulate Space,” Joan R. Branham argues about the experiences art viewers have in museums based on their surroundings. Her points include how a person is to completely understand and feel a ritual object if it is taken out of its natural context or how someone is able to fully appreciate of work of art if they can’t see it where it truly belongs.
The mission of LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes is a non-profit organization/museum founded to celebrate and cultivate an appreciation for the enduring and evolving influence of Mexican and Mexican-American culture, with a specific focus upon the unique Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles and Southern California. The museum itself is near where Los Angeles was founded in 1871 and includes a 2.2 anchor campus that includes two historic and renovated buildings (Vickrey Brunswig Building and Plaza House). All surrounded by beautiful public gardens. La Plaza is also located near the heart of Los Angeles surrounded by other ethnic sites like Little Tokyo. (However after visiting one can 't help to realize the homeless problem in the Los Angeles area, and realizing some are even Chicano.)
Many might have been working on Good Friday, but many others were enjoying The Frist Museum of Visual Arts. A museum visitor visited this exhibit on April 14, 2017 early in the morning. The time that was spent at the art museum was approximately two hours and a half. The first impression that one received was that this place was a place of peace and also a place to expand the viewer’s imagination to understand what artists were expressing to the viewers. The viewer was very interested in all the art that was seen ,but there is so much one can absorb. The lighting in the museum was very low and some of the lighting was by direction LED lights. The artwork was spaciously
For majority of people, cruising through a fine arts museum or gallery is nothing short of browsing through a textbook and failing to grasping knowledge of the content. A casual activity and check off ones list of to-dos, sometimes done just for the appearance it offers. Of that majority, one might look at a painting for a long while before connecting the uncommunicated dots from gallery label. But for the small remaining others, a trip to an art exhibition is a journey through emotions and feelings rendered by the artists of the particular works of art. Leo Tolstoy deems this to be the appropriate response to “true art” in his What is Art?, published in 1897. Tolstoy responds to the
Baxandall, Michael. "Exhibiting intention: Some preconditions of the visual display of culturally purposeful objects." Exhibiting cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display (1991): 33-41.
Though most works of art have some underlying, deeper meaning attached to them, our first impression of their significance comes through our initial visual interpretation. When we first view a painting or a statue or other piece of art, we notice first the visual details – its size, its medium, its color, and its condition, for example – before we begin to ponder its greater significance. Indeed, these visual clues are just as important as any other interpretation or meaning of a work, for they allow us to understand just what that deeper meaning is. The expression on a statue’s face tells us the emotion and message that the artist is trying to convey. Its color, too, can provide clues: darker or lighter colors can play a role in how we judge a piece of art. The type of lines used in a piece can send different messages. A sculpture, for example, may have been carved with hard, rough lines or it may have been carved with smoother, more flowing lines that portray a kind of gentleness.
Duncan’s (1991) analysis of western museums is defined through the theme of “durable objects” as a criterion to judge the heritage of American and European art as a ritual of the modern state. In this manner western art museums are built like “temples” as a symbolic and figurative representation of greatness of western culture throughout the world: “[They] are more like the traditional ceremonial monuments that museum buildings often emulate—classical temples” (Duncan 90). This interpretation of American/European museums defines a dominant source of cultural heritage that ritualizes
...he ‘actual’ objects. In comparison, the museum acts as a reminiscing snapshot of what was an unending change. This change was not the result of expansion but was rather a continual reframing of Soane’s perception of the world, which resulted in a continuous change in the positioning of the spaces within the house. The peculiar organization of the spaces and its objects is an imitation or rather mirroring of Soane’s mind, which was not orderly organized and catalogued but endlessly intricate. The house and his mind were filled with never-ending routes and labyrinth like viewpoints ranging throughout, which acted in conglomerate ways. The use of perspective and play with viewpoints in both works in relation to the division between social class, makes us as viewers realize the complexity of a human mind, its thoughts and perception on the spaces and people around it.
As one enters the gallery, one experiences the fun of looking at simple, painted drawings of six men on the wall talking on cell phones with letters reading “idiots” in their mouths. Across the room space, machine-like drawings as well as drawings of people dominate the walls. Different abstracted, simplified people like sculptures as well as machine like sculptures are spread across the floor. This reminds of a childlike setting where everything is just spread across the room instead of being carefully organized. The second room is also organized in the same manner with some...
The National Gallery of Art (NGA) houses some of the most prolific art in the world. Around four million people visit the NGA each year to gaze upon the collection of close to 130,000 items on display making it the sixth most popular art museum in the world (Lowe, 2013). The amount of foot traffic experienced by the museum provides the ideal setting to observe people as they move about the museum. The purpose of this paper is to observe human behavior in a social setting. A location in the west building of the NGA was selected for its vantage point to observe people as they transitioned through the museum. People were studied for a time of twenty-five minutes and observations were conducted to examine their demeanor, reactions, and interactions with other individuals. The twenty-five minute observation time established the behavior of individuals at the NGA. The second part of this observation was to break a social norm and observe the reaction of people when the norm was violated. This paper is a detailed account of observations made at the NGA and examines these interaction using sociological concepts.
One pleasant afternoon, my classmates and I decided to visit the Houston Museum of Fine Arts to begin on our museum assignment in world literature class. According to Houston Museum of Fine Art’s staff, MFAH considers as one of the largest museums in the nation and it contains many variety forms of art with more than several thousand years of unique history. Also, I have never been in a museum in a very long time especially as big as MFAH, and my experience about the museum was unique and pleasant. Although I have observed many great types and forms of art in the museum, there were few that interested me the most.
Professor LaFleur in lecture on November 11 mentioned, “Museums were extremely powerful in shaping the way people saw the world” (Lecture 007). This same reasoning is why Fusco and Pena embark on this ethnographic journey. By displaying “A Savage Performance”, we see that they are subverting the past notions of ethnography. Ethnographic museums as the ones Sara Baartman was displayed in served a purpose and created a certain kind of discourse. “Discourse do not simply reflect reality, or innocently designate objects; rather they constitute them in specific contexts according to particular relations of power” (Lidchi, p. 185). Lidchi goes on to say that ethnography was created by the dominant culture in the imperial c...
Sarah Thornton has described, in detail, various people during her experience in the art world. Her description of each individual is supposed to be of an unbiased opinion. While reading, it is shown that such writing is not always presented; leading the readers to have a biased opinion formed for them. This is shown as she stumbled on Hans Ulrich Obrist; an art curator, historian, and critic. Thornton quickly jumped to a conclusion of Obrist’s attitude towards the art world; making her “nonjudgmental participant observer” (Thornton 256) hard to come by.
On 13rd of October, at 3:57p.m., I found a seat next to the ceiling window on the ground floor in the San Diego Public Library and started my observation. The whole floor is surrounded by the ceiling windows which allow the allow luminance of sunlight to shine deeply into the library. My location was facing both the children’s library and the area which serves a branch of CD and DVDs. On that day, the library was also holding a mini exhibition names as the “Guardian Spirit Sacred Sculpture from the Continent of African”. Even though there are three wooden bookshelfs displayed orderly between my location and the children library, I can still clearly observe my target who is located in the children library.
When I saw Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring about five years ago at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., I felt something about the painting that I had never felt before when looking at artwork. I felt as if this girl, this young woman in the painting was real, hiding in the museum behind this canvas. She was in the flesh. Her skin was still dewy from three hundred-something years ago, the light across her face still glowing. She was in the round, her eyes followed mine, she was real. She was about to speak, she was in a moment of thought, she was in reflection. This girl was not crimson red or titanium white, she was flesh. Vermeer caught her, a butterfly in his hand. She was not just recorded on canvas, she was created on canvas. She was caught in a moment of stillness. Vermeer creates moments in his paintings. When viewing them, we step into a private, intimate setting, a story. Always, everything is quiet and calm. I realize now it is no wonder I had such a strong reaction to Vermeer the first time I saw him: he is a stillness seeker.
‘Savage Beauty’ was an exhibition that pushed the boundaries of museology, in its artistic, social and critical undertakings. The questions brought to bear by the exhibition of contemporary art and culture in various situations is something I am interested in researching further with a degree in curating.