Postmodern Concepts' Influence on Museology

Positioned alongside Central Park in the heart of New York City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest and most influential art museums in the world. The Met houses an extensive collection of curated works that spans throughout various time periods and different cultures. The context of museum, especially one as influential as the Met, inherently predisposes its visitors to a certain set of understandings that subtly influence how they interpret and ultimately construct meanings about each individual object within the museum. Brent Plate in Religion, Art, and Visual Culture argues that “objects obtain different meanings in different locations and historical settings.”An object placed on display behind a glass case inside a museum would hold a vastly different meaning if it was put on sale by a street vendor, like the ones who set up their tables in close proximity to the Met. The different meanings that objects are able to obtain is attributed to the relationships that are established between the object itself and the environment that surrounds it. These relationships often involve the kind of audience that a museum attracts, where the work is exhibited, and how the exhibits within a museum is planned out. Museums subsequently have the ability to control how these relationships are established which influences the way a viewer is able to construct meaning. When a visitor observes an object on display at the Met, they instinctively construct a certain set of

I fell in love with methodologies of art history. I felt empowered in that, through my own interpretations, I could attach words and meaning to objects. My study of art history reached a turning point when, in 2012, I took a class entitled Identity in a Post-Identity Art World: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Trans/Nationality, 1990 to the Present. The course endowed me with another lens with which to examine works and, more importantly, shed light on representations of marginalized identities. As a result, I was introduced to the writings of Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir, both seminal theorists who inspired my own analyses. I enjoyed every minute of conducting research and forming arguments to support my claims. Ultimately I was interested in developing my understanding of issues in contemporary art further and sought to accomplish this by engaging with a larger

The Guerrilla Girls speak about sexism in art galleries and the non appreciation of women 's art in the most prestigious galleries of New York. “a very big problem is the fact women don 't collect. ... Men buy the art and call the shots museums. Until women support women and collect each things will never change" (Withers 287). Women artists new to the art world were not accepted, men artist bought their art to present as their own. This way women artist do not get the chance to be recognized for their talent. Making the assumption women are only valued as the model but cannot aspire to be artists and create exceptional work as men would. This is of importance because only 1% or none of the art presented was of women artists. “not only in their appeals to principles of equality, but also, say, in their gesture of adopting the names of deceased female artists as aliases, a gambit tacitly

Positioned alongside Central Park within the heart of New York City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest and most influential art museums in the world. The Met houses an extensive collection of curated works that spans throughout various time periods and different cultures. The context of museums, especially one as influential as the Met, inherently predisposes its visitors to a set of understandings that subtly influence how they interpret and ultimately construct meanings about each individual object within a museum. By analyzing two separate works on exhibit at the Met, I will pose the argument that museums offer a unique expression of a world view that is dictated through every element of its construction.

In 1985 the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) of New York held an exhibition of contemporary art entitled An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. Of the 169 artists who participated in it, only 13 were women. In front of the museum was a strange group against this inequality: they were women, they wore masks of apes and called themselves Guerrilla Girls. They shared a sense of frustration at the fact that by the end of the century the differences between the sexes persisted and the female artists continued to lack recognition.

What is clear is that feminist art history is not meant to sway art history solely towards the feminist perspective, but to add it to the art historical canon to even out any inequalities. By continuously questioning any theories of both traditional art history, but also those of postmodernism, the evolution of feminist art history continues to develop, hopefully to its benefit. Clearly, feminist art history has come a long way in a comparatively short time; however, this does not mean that there is not room for improvement. Indeed, after reading these essays, there is a distinctly obvious need to take action to advance feminist art history so that, in turn, other methodologies of art history can develop to become more effective, influential, and inclusive. It is astonishing to learn how complicated that feminist art history truly is, for there are so many factors that must be taken into consideration, and the span of these factors only continues to

In this essay I will be looking at the movement which changed everything throughout the art world. This was in fact the Feminist movement, it had a drastic impact on the way people were in the art world when women were seen differently to men. I will be discussing what happened and the groups there were through those years that stood up for what they believed was wrong and tried to make a difference. Feminism in the 1960’s was like the women’s suffrage movement that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, the feminism in the 1960s, 70s and 80s put a necessary emphasis on the ongoing cultural battles.

When looking at basic statistics presented by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the references present articles from reputable journals, displaying a prevalence of the details to contemporary women on the field. This inequality impacts not only artists, but also gallery directors. As stated, the women who run museums are on a notably smaller budget than those run by men. When looking at the artist side of it, as of 2016, only five women made the lsit of the top 100 artists by cumulative auction value for a total of five years (“National Museum of Women in the Arts”). This disparity in recognition will continue to be explored through contemporary art history in criticism of past to present female

Formed in 1985, Guerrilla Girls is an activist group of feminist and also, female artists dedicated to fight sexism and racism in the art world. They would wear gorilla masks and post poster and campaigns of the issue of sexism and bring awareness. In one of their campaigns, they stated that ar galleries only showed roughly 10% of women artist, which today is still only around 20%. Also, around 1985, New York museums, such as The Met, Guggenheim, and Whitney, never gave women artist a solo exhibition show, but then, in 2014, each museum gave a women artist one solo show, which still is not great. In 1989, Guerrilla Girls Created a posted saying “Less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 76% of the nudes are female” which is awful. They also created The Report Card. Created in 1986, the Guerrilla Girls created a “report card” for different art galleries and calculated of two year (1985-6 and 1986-7) and in the columns, the number of women have been seen in the galleries, and there is nothing about 4 women. This drew attention to realize that little to no women showed up to art

The Nude in Art History, which covers “sexual objectification, double standard of sexual behavior, and the Madonna-Whore Complex” talks about how women were and are portrayed in art. Many times women are seen as sexual objects (sexual objectification). This double standard on how women should be treated compared to men is a real issue, and art from the past really displays that issue. “Seeing comes before words” (Berger pg.7), a very powerful quote, Berger goes into saying that the way we see things is different than the way we speak of things. Sometimes when you see something words can do no justice. I think taking that idea away from Berger and putting it in relation to this unit’s topic, the way women are portrayed in art, lets the viewer

I decided to do my analysis on why women have been excluded from the art history in the past. In the past centuries, women were often kept away from the arts because of their gender and they often faced many challenges. Also, one of the other reasons I think is that they usually had to take care of their household and children and didn’t really get the chance to pursue a career. They often didn’t get the opportunity to pursue an education. Although there were female artists in the past, they never really got recognition for their work and they had a hard time selling their artwork. Also, women probably either had to choose between their career or marriage. In that time period, women often had a lot of pressure from the society. Women during

Our class textbook, Exploring Art: A Global, Thematic Approach, offers historical context into the role of gender in art. The text examines gender roles across time periods, countries, and mediums, revealing much of the reason we are where we are today. As a part of the Cengage curriculum, it highlights some of the most crucial points and works throughout history, such as Abduction of the Daughters of Leucippus, to depict the context of the origins of the female relationship throughput art

Lucy Lippard, a United States internationally known writer, art critic, and activist recognized the dematerialization at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. Lippard felt the feminist contribution to art was the lack of contributing to modernism. “Offering a socially concerned alternative, threading female experience into the fabric of mainstream art through autobiography, narrative, and collage, feminism aimed not to add a new style, or shift the formal trajectory of art” (Pollock, 70). The view is that feminism has affected the historical interpretation, and emphasizes of how it is dangerous. This is linked to the issue of preservation and cataloguing, which as the author says creates division and keeps

Women faced many obstacles in becoming artists, and being recognized for their work. A multitude of people do not consider women artists to be prevalent in history, but that is simply because they were invisibilized. Throughout time, women have had very few rights; In some periods of

I was always amazed with the artistic craftsmanship and emotional power of long chain of women artists from Artemisia Gentileschi to Camille Claudel and Frida Kahlo. It was clear that in the past, the amount of women artist was limited due to traditional position of women in the society as subordinate and dependent on men. Likewise, I have never been aware of women discriminative tendencies by museums until I came across activity of Guerilla Girls. Interestingly, it was MoMA exhibition of 1989 that made women-artists so mad that they started their movement to promote a proper balance between men and women artists within museum