Wrap-Up

Moderator

Once more, we have had powerful and strongly contrasting posts from our contributors. For Jennie, the classical frames of the museum and of other sites for contemporary art have been in part called into question by the museum itself through a process of auto-critique. It may even rescue history from obscurity by bringing historical architecture and contemporary art into productive proximity. For Martha, there is a salutary moment in the current revamp of the cultivated person, since now at least labor is acknowledged rather than suppressed. She also points to an alliance, historically incompatible but convenient, between the vanguard merger of art and life remade as a service and the consoling classical frame. Writing from Oaxaca, Francisco provides us with a vision of a still-living history in the form of a restored sixteenth-century church, set alongside a popular art that contests the right to the city and is suppressed by naked force.

Despite the “wrapping-up” designation of this last posting of mine, I don’t want to add much to what our panelists have said, or to impose too definitive a last word. Perhaps it’s enough to say that all are united in thinking that history has much to say to the present: in tracking the trajectory of the museum and of critical discourse about art; in the changes in the figure and role of the artist, and of the ever-evolving philosophical terms with which art has been described; and in the continued life of an art that would contest established hierarchies.