Event Culture:
The Museum and Its Staging of Contemporary Art

http://eventculture.ikk.ku.dk/

November 6-7, 2009

Venues: Arken Museum of Modern Art, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Copenhagen Doctoral School of Cultural Studies
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies

The role of the art museum has changed drastically during the past
decades. So has the role of contemporary art within the art museum.
Once institutions for preserving and producing knowledge for eternity,
museums increasingly become arenas for experience and events of the
moment. The interest in contemporary art towards re-uniting art and
life in 'micro utopian' models, such as proposed by Nicolas Bourriaud,
makes art works perform in ways not incomparable to the workings of
the entertainment industry. The shared tendency between museums and
contemporary art towards staging and performing ephemeral events and
experiences changes the fundamental functions of the museum within a
broader cultural context and might indeed change the very role of art
in society as well.

The conference critically addresses these changes and their
implications on several levels:

On a cultural level the changes call for a rethinking of the functions
of the art museum. Where the idea of preservation was central to the
founding of museum institutions, preservation seems less important
today. Rather, the focus has shifted towards another core aspect of
the museum institution, namely that of public accessibility and
audiences. This indicates a shift from substance and solidity towards
activity and performance; the representation of history, which can be
considered an important motive for preservation, has gradually become
less outspoken, while representation of contemporaneousness in various
guises simultaneously has grown in significance. This raises many
questions, among them the questions of what knowledge the museum
institution produces and which public demands it facilitates.
On a curatorial level these changes manifest themselves in a tendency
towards privileging the temporary exhibition over the permanent
collection. The permanent collection regarded as the sum of the
preservation efforts of the museum institution seems largely to have
become a burden rather than an asset, whereas the temporary exhibition
is viewed as the medium that holds the potential of drawing a large
number of audiences. This tendency is followed by a growing number of
freelance curators that work independently of institutions and
consequently outside of museums with permanent collections. The
expertise of the curator has changed from classical art historical
knowledge and skills to knowledge of 'the state of the art' of the art
scene and that of 'story telling' or generating narratives. This
raises questions of the role of the curator both in and outside
museums today, and of the qualifications, competences, skills and
responsibilities of the curator.

On the level of exhibitions these changes are evident in the
privileging of the thematic exhibition format over the chronological
exhibition format, and the group show over the solo show. Classical
art historical exhibition formats such as the monographic exhibition
and the survey show are superseded by exhibitions that concentrate on
thematic groupings of art works, often disregarding principles of
chronology, history, style and medium in favour of staging connections
or 'dialogues' of a thematic or formal nature between artworks. The
raison d'être of the exhibition seems in general to be moving from
that of generating knowledge to that of creating events and
sensations, stressing the theatrical and spectacular qualities of
artworks. The innovations in the field of exhibition aesthetics raise
questions of what kinds of context that are being provided and what
kinds of knowledge that are being produced in museum exhibitions, and
how the audience is supposed to, and indeed given the option to,
engage in this production.

The conference will address these three aspects of the problems raised
by the staging of contemporary art in the museum within the framework
of the history of the exhibition. As such the conference aims at
discussing the specific problems related to the exhibition of art in a
museal frame today, while providing bearing points for the writing of
a history of the exhibition in a broader cultural context.

http://eventculture.ikk.ku.dk/