Yes, it’s still just my little cousin and my boyfriend. But as this project is nearing its end, I’ve realized that I may have not addressed why the topic of museums even matters to us.
Why bother with art and the museums?
In her essay, “The Museums’ Future”, Juliet Styen states, “art has been ceded variously to culture, commerce, politics, values and to experience.” It is representative of us; our culture and our past and present. However, she also states, “museums are inevitably contradictory—as are the concerns of art exhibitions that are always ambiguous. On the one hand, they connote our need for conservation, inventories, and for history: on the other, our desire for novelty and the affirmation of our new experience of art.” Museums provide us with an education, an experience and hopefully a chance to react.
As Styen expresses, museums are products of conglomeration and dichotomies. No matter to what extent or how vastly, as culture changes, so does art. Take Pop Art for example. It stemmed from the aspects of popular culture that had a powerful impact on contemporary life. And according to the Encyclopedia Britannica “It was also iconoclastic, rejecting both the supremacy of the ‘high art’ of the past and the pretensions of other contemporary avant-garde art. Pop art became a cultural event because of its close reflection of a particular social situation and because its easily comprehensible images were immediately exploited by the mass media.” This exemplifies how art and the museums that store this art become important to us. It includes, culture, social commentary, and the media.
‘Til next time,
Son
“They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” By Andy Warhol
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