Museum Skepticism

David Carrier is the Champney Family Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art. His books include "Sean Scully"; "Writing about Visual Art"; "The Aesthetics of Comics"; "High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting"; "Principles of Art History Writing"; and "Poussin's Paintings."

"David Carrier is one of only a handful of scholars who inhabit with ease the diverse worlds of philosophy, art history, art criticism, and now museology. His philosophical acuity probes the responsibilities, shortcomings, and achievements of art museums, and the responses of their academic critics. Carrier's provocative reflections on the successive metamorphoses of these irreplaceable yet infuriating institutions are sure to be a stimulus to the democratic conversation about their future that he so warmly advocates. Reading Carrier is like reading Montaigne: no one could be a more thoughtful, witty, or erudite imaginary interlocutor for the fortunate reader of this impassionedly personal yet highly disciplined book."--Ivan Gaskell, Harvard University

Acknowledgments ix
Overture 1
1. “Beauty and Art, History and Fame and Power”: On Entering the Louvre 17
2. Art and Power: Time Travel in the Museum 39
3. Museum Skeptics 51
4. Picturing Museum Skepticism 74
5. Art Museum Narratives 91
6. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Museum 110
7. Ernest Fenollosa’s History of Asian Art 126
8. Albert Barnes’s Foundation and the Place of Modernist Art within the Art Museum 146
9. The Display of Absolutely Contemporary Art in the J. Paul Getty Museum 165
10. The End of the Modern Public Art Museum: A Tale of Two Cities 181
Conclusion: What the Public Art Museum Might Become 208
Notes 225
Bibliography 269
Index 305