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- Convenor:
-
Silvia Forni
(Royal Ontario Museum)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Alan Smart
(University of Calgary)
- Track:
- Museum Anthropology
- Location:
- University Place 4.213
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 6 August, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on structural and interdependent relationship between the opacity of practices and the transparency of the publicly held policy discourse of museums, companies, and institutions claiming ethical and/or aesthetic intrinsic values.
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks to analyze the interdependent relationship between the opacity of practices and the transparency of the publicly held policy discourse of museums, companies, and institutions. Actors in charge construct officially confirmed codes of conduct rooted in a pact of trust with customers, one that assumes respect of a tacit agreement on the legitimacy of their aesthetic or/and ethical frames of judgement. Multiple interfaces of opaque relationships develop, in spite of - or thanks to - the loud public discourse on ethics and transparency.
Taking a theoretical starting point, this panel focuses on situations claiming ethical and/or aesthetic intrinsic values. 'Beauty' and 'goodness' of a given final product (objects, practices, individuals or categories) may thus appear as directly proportional to the degree of opacity of the production stages.
Very useful insights can be gleaned from analysing the processes that lead to the creation of ethical and aesthetic standards for the circulation of art objects/merchandise. Papers on interfaces between museums and the art market, relationships between official and clandestine trade chains (gold, precious stones, food, second-hand and counterfeited items, etc.), and institutional production of illegality are most welcome.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 6 August, 2013, -Sonia Catrina (CSIER-Centre for the Study of the Jewish History in Romania & CEREFREA-Centre Régional francophone de recherches avancées en sciences sociales)
Paper short abstract:
The objective of this study is to analyze the Romanian “patrimonial productions” put in perspective alongside with the discourse and practices of different actors in order to identify interferences, tensions and conflicts of representation among them.
Paper long abstract:
This study has a three-fold purpose: first, it aims at identifying the criteria promoted by the official cultural policy makers according to which a "good" could get "patrimonial value" and enter the sphere of national "cultural heritage". Second, it aims at examining the vocabulary as well as the representations of professional institutional actors in charge to implement the criteria that were institutionally established, such as museum experts trained in cultural mediation; third, it aims at analyzing the "heteroglossia" of "indigenous heritagization", typical of private family museums/domestic museums belonging to individual actors which undertake an individual construction of "patrimonial good". The reflexive approach relates to the realm of "heritagized goods", the status of the actors engaged in heritagization, the various discourses on cultural heritage, the reference to the principles and criteria according to which one assesses "patrimonial value" of a specific "good". By taking into account interferences, tensions and conflicts of representation among different actors, related to "goods that are to be heritagized", this study proposes an analysis of the forms whereby identities are institutionalised in parallel with the individual's growing decision power within his own construction. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyse the "multivocality" of the term "heritage" in the Romanian cultural sphere through the lens of its perception. The analysis of "patrimonial value" for the aforementioned actors may reveal completely new understandings and constructions of heritage, and it may lead to the identification of processes meant to reconfigure the status of "patrimonial goods".
Silvia Forni (Royal Ontario Museum)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the complex intersections between the market of traditional African art and museum displays in African and in the West. While both museological settings present a reflection on culture, beauty is mostly the result of a denial of contradictory historical and market relations.
Paper long abstract:
In the last four decades the academic discourse on African art has expanded its scope. Yet, when it comes to the art market and Western museum displays, canonical definitions of authenticity still hold strong: "traditional" objects are usually included in virtue of their pedigree and stylistic conformity. "Ethical" acquisitions of African antiquities require that museums do not acquire pieces exported after the ratification of the 1970 Unesco convention on Cultural property. This practice has affected, at least ideally, the presentation of presentation of "traditional" African arts and cultures in Western museums. A visit to 12 small museums in central and western Cameroon has presented me with a very different selection of objects placed on display: commercial, "spurious," "non-canonical" or just simply "wrong". This paper reflects on the one hand, on the contradictory field of the market of traditional African art, which continues to thrive in complex and interesting ways despite international conventions. On the other, I look at African museum as a challenge to Western taxonomies and expertise as new material meanings are constructed pushing the limits of our canonical understanding and of ideas of beauty and value. I suggest that the heterogeneous and inconsistent collections of the Grassfields' museums may be read as more authentic translations of the complexity, contradiction, global connections and historical developments of the cultural milieus in which they are located than the purified and canonized representations celebrated in western displays, where beauty is often the result of the stripping or even the denial of history.
Jane Nadel-Klein (Trinity College)
Paper short abstract:
The social production of Western gardens obscures the underlying market nexus in favor of an aesthetic predicated upon ideals of individual creativity and a gift economy. Plant distribution is increasingly dominated by large-scale producers in ways that threaten these ideals and that gardeners seldom consider.
Paper long abstract:
The garden occupies a unique space in the Western imagination: a sequestered locale where ideals of aesthetic production, closeness to "nature," nurturance and the values of a gift economy explicitly prevail. Like an art collection, its commitments to accepted standards of design rest upon notions of the good and the beautiful. Plant marketers encourage gardeners to think of themselves as creative and individual. However, behind these discourses lies a world of commodity chains that constrain gardeners' choices of what to grow. The "green industry" refers to the entire plant supply process, from laboratory to grower, wholesaler, large and small retailer, and, finally, to the gardener as consumer. Plant marketing is big business and plants are commodities. Nonetheless, small nurseries rely upon personal, enduring connections with their customers. Money changes hands, but information, concern and expertise are freely offered as gifts. Transactions do little to challenge gardeners' sense of themselves as engaged in an enterprise divorced from the world of low-wage labor and social inequalities. Transactions at large garden centers and big box stores convey the opposite. There, the plant's commoditized aspects are impossible to ignore. While many gardeners shop there, they often apologize for doing so. This paper is based upon long-term research with gardeners and owners of small scale enterprises who speak resentfully about such developments as the "branding" of plant varieties, a marketing effort which some regard as dubiously ethical.