The Challenged and Changing Museum
Of Artifice and the Artful
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gita Pai
The illicit trade in cultural property, including theft, fraud, looting, and trafficking, is one of the largest and most challenging criminal activities globally. Implemented on an international scale, the illegal trade in stolen art and antiquities is worth an estimated $6 billion annually. Although general art crime is often the third highest grossing crime (after money laundering and terrorist activities), it is confronted with only a fraction of the resources. Furthermore, national and international efforts to contain the practice struggle to be successful and the trade continues to be a growing problem. This paper explores the disturbing situation in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, India, where looters and smugglers employ trickery to steal medieval-period bronze statues of Hindu deities from temples and to sell them to eager collectors and museums abroad, leaving police officers to rely on innovative ways to apprehend the thieves, and villagers—bereft of their gods—to find artful solutions to worship. In this account of thievery, museum purchase, detective work, and religious practice, the Hindu deity is a transforming embodiment of the divine, black-market commodity, an art piece, and criminal evidence, underscoring the multiplicity, adaptability, and inventiveness involved in Hinduism, its divinities, and their representations.
The Museum as a Pedagogical Portal for Project Based Learning
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session D. Rose Elder, Peter Rutkoff
Our paper demonstrates methodologies that use art from two different museum collections to enhance the teaching and learning of cultural studies in project based learning. We adapt a model of “artifactual analysis,” a pedagogical inquiry in African Studies and American Studies that applies close reading of a work of art in context, by combining it with visual learning strategies (VSL) to arrive at an understanding of social, cultural and political meanings of the text. For example, the stools of Ewe chiefs' stools in the Volta Regional Museum reveal the socio-cultural history of the region. The stool is literally the seat of his power. He chooses the symbol that represents his view of his authority. In project-based inquiry, students move toward a deep study of how traditional Ewe culture adapted to the impositions of colonial control and, more recently, to the pressures of modern life. Similarly, VLS applied to William Sidney Mount’s “Eel Spearing at Setauket” (1845) from the Fennimore Museum invites questions about social and racial content---from the farmhouse, to the African American woman, to her relationship with white boy, to the existence of free black communities in the North. VLS’s power of inquiry demystifies the analysis of fine, folk, and material art and culture and asks students to trust their ability to see and to know. This heightens contextual interpretation and allows students to share research-based answers. Combining Artifactual Analysis and VLS enhances project-based inquiry. It reconnects the aesthetic and the social and revitalizes teaching and learning.
The Impact of Art, Beauty and Aesthetics as a Supplement to Gifted Education, Growth, Development and Social Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Shaughnessy, Jayson Evaniuck
The arts, beauty, museums and aesthetics are beneficial as textual stimulant in literature, memory, cognition, and wonderment in the growth and development of gifted, and talented children. This paper will focus on how and why beauty and aesthetics enhance learning, as well as personal growth and development. The encouragement of feelings and emotions lends to the development of the entire child, as well as to the development of curiosity, wonder and enchantment. This paper will call upon the foundational work of Pestalozzi, Comstock, Carson, and Milne’s advocacy for wonderment and sensory leaning as well as the work of Aesthetics education advocates Harry Broudy and more recently Bruce Uhrmacher and Wilfred McClay. Artifacts and exemplars will be provided as well as current research into museum education.
Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Curatorship and Ekphrasis
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vincentziu V Puscasu
The following article proposal investigates the means by which the curatorial practice can claim a resistance against the phenomenon called entropy and its effects in contemporary artwork exhibitions. Starting from the second law of thermodynamics, the proposed methodology would include the classification of variables and their equivalent in the artistic paradigm. The values would be attributed based on the textual reference of the art corpus. By this I intend to state that cultural and artistic dissipation can be enriched by measuring the entropy and enthalpy of a curatorial system. The main hypothesis would state that the rhetoric exercise of depicting an art corpus can provide valuable (and perhaps computable) knowledge about the optimal curatorial instrumentation of the exhibition. A secondary hypothesis would imply the visualization of ekphrastic textual corpus as an object of art itself (a manifestation of art – kunswtollen). The final objective I want to point out is the possibility of integrating textual narratives and iconographic analysis into the curatorial practice by ”reverse-engineering” the whole creative process of configurating an exhibition. This can be done by translating the theoretical art history into a practical approach. Therefore, the purpose of my paper is the enriching of curatorial methodologies using auxiliary resources (as physics, logic, rhetoric, and history of art), and perhaps a joint-perspective of the multiple art specters, reunited and adapted to a post-modern paradigm . My research should be read and classified as a speculative case study, based on my curatorial activity of 2018.
