bookish

Lately I've been stumbling through Museums in a Troubled World:  Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse? by Robert R. Janes.  Of course the topic interests me because it has to do with my future/lack of career, and I've also been asking myself, if museums could be irrelevant, could I also be irrelevant?  As a museum worker, that is.  Now I haven't finished, because I've been distracted by rereading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but I just had a thought...

Janes is from a more ethnological background; he's involved in museums of natural and cultural history, so there is no real mention of art museums specifically.  But of course that doesn't mean the two types of institution aren't suffering from the same entropy.  And I've been questioning my own understanding of contemporary art anyway, after years of reading job descriptions that ask for a "deep understanding of contemporary art."  My latest conclusion is that I don't know a damn thing, despite all the education and gallery-hopping.  My problem with contemporary art is not just that it always seems so inaccessible to the general public (and it is beyond difficult to coax this same general public into viewing contemporary art as anything but foreign), but that it doesn't have the same historical value (as Riegl would put it) as the objects in an anthropological or archaeological exhibit.  Humans have been making art for a while now, yet the oldest of the old once served a purpose other than expression.  Caveat:  that is what scholars have surmised.  If indeed the paintings at Lascaux were pure expression and had nothing to do with hunting prowess or ritual, then it's all good.  No argument here.  However, the dominant wisdom points to ritual purposes, the precursors of religion, if you will.  Up through art history, art has served as a devotional tool, a civic unifier, and a commercial venture.  That's why any talk of self-expression seems flat to me.  If contemporary art has no ritualistic background, no purpose other than the proverbial "art for art's sake," then I have trouble seeing it (as a whole) as the visual products of a culture.  I often wonder if museums in the next few centuries will group our art geographically, chronologically, or otherwise.  Would it make sense to them?

And now as I read through, none of this makes sense.