Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums - Softcover

Fisher, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067454305X ISBN 13: 9780674543058

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Philip Fisher charts the pivotal role the museum has played in modern culture, revealing why it has become central to industrial society and how, in turn, artists have adapted to the museum's growing power, shaping their works with the museum in mind. He explores how, over the last two centuries, museums have presented art objects outside their original context, effacing them, in order to represent them in a sequential ordering of styles. It is this sequence that artists such as Jasper Johns and Frank Stella have mirrored, even parodied. This book is an important contribution to our understanding of modern art and culture.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Fisher is the Felice Crowl Reid Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University.

From Kirkus Reviews

A brilliant, intricate interpretation of modern art's progress as it reflects the dictates of the museum, by a Harvard professor of English. Fisher casts the art museum as the major interpreter of industrialized culture, countering the pull of mass production by designating what is unique and ``irreplaceable''--what counts as art. Indeed, the museum has changed the way we look at objects- -crucifix and Greek vase alike--by extricating them from their cultural context, ``effacing'' their intended meaning, and rearranging them in a time-line of art history. In Fisher's provocative view, the ``natural art'' for ``museum culture'' is abstract art, its ``essential subject matter'' the ``linear ordering and the cancellation of content,'' each museum functions. Jasper Johns and Frank Stella aim their art at the museum, their ambition to make it ``the future's past.'' Johns's paintings go so far as to mimic the museum, effacing our own cultural symbols- -numbers, letters, and the American flag--of their meaning and reworking them as shards and as art. The ``knowing and sophisticated'' Stella paints in ``series'' ``ready to be swallowed whole by art history.'' Fisher grounds what is complicated and narrowly focused but exceptionally accessible academic theory in Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Meyer Shapiro, animating it with observations that stick: that all modern painting is about ``the stranger''; that ``it is memory rather than realism that photography drained from painting and sculpture''; that Degas conceals his shocking industrialization of the body by seeming to seize a bather's momentary pose; that our perception of the Parthenon frieze changes forever when fragments are brought down from their original elevated location to eye-level in a gallery. A ringing affirmation, in the company of Arthur Danto's Encounters and Reflections and Robert Hughes's Nothing if Not Critical (both 1990), that today art criticism is often contemporary art's most interesting aspect. (Forty-four illustrations--some seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 067454305X
• ISBN 13: 9780674543058
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288