Word: museums
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...museum evolved, however, divisions emerged between the fine art museum and the anthropology or archaeology museum. In the 19th century, the Golden Age of Museums, cultural objects were seen as belonging to two different categories: art objects, considered primarily for their aesthetic value and arranged chronologically to trace artistic developments, and artifacts, grouped by civilization and serving as generic representatives of a particular culture. Not surprisingly, the objects designated art tended to be Western, while those classified as artifacts tended to be from so-called “primitive” cultures such as Native American, sub-Saharan African...
...former Musée d’Éthnographie du Trocadéro founded in 1878 underwent various iterations before giving way in 2006 to the Musée du Quai Branly, whose controversial name alone indicates a refusal to identify itself as an anthropology or ethnography museum. The collections of the Quai Branly museum are beautifully displayed and treated as aesthetic objects rather than as historic artifacts that serve as lenses into the culture. Like a Greek krater or a Renaissance altarpiece, African textiles and Oceanic masks can be stripped of their initial context and function?...
Closer to home, the traditional dichotomy between art and artifacts is also slowly beginning to break down. In just a few months, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA) will unveil its new wing devoted to the Art of the Americas. The new wing, designed by Norman Foster, will contain over 50 new galleries spread over four floors. Visitors will begin on the ground floor with the Pre-Columbian era and work their way up until they get to the modernist masters like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline on the top floor, alongside African-American artist Jacob Lawrence...
Here on campus, the traditional distinction between art and anthropology, embodied in the existence of the Harvard Art Museum, on the one hand, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology on the other, is also being obscured...
...third floor of the Sackler galleries, Harvard Art Museum curator and History professor Ivan Gaskell has installed a Native American archer’s bow on loan from the Peabody Museum. Many courses taught by History of Art and Architecture faculty also incorporate objects from the Peabody’s collections and hold their sections in the Peabody galleries. This Thursday, April 1, the Harvard Art Museum Undergraduate Connection, which traditionally holds events at the Harvard Art Museum, will host a Night at the Peabody Museum, with student-led tours that treat the objects on display as artworks worthy...