Discourse and Display: The Modern Eye, Entrepreneurship, and the Cultural Transformation of the Patchwork Quilt

Abstract

This article explores the effort of two cultural entrepreneurs to persuade members of the fine art world to appreciate quilts on purely artistic grounds. Mobilizing museum resources to effect this transformation involved strategies of discourse and display that invoked the modern eye, a way of seeing that privileges modernist aesthetic standards. By examining these strategies, a deeper understanding of how the modern eye is constructed by the cultural tools of the museum (for example, gallery space, photography, catalogs, critical writing) becomes apparent. This piece also considers the implications of the modern eye for how marginalized culture becomes “acceptable” in high culture contexts and the costs of invoking the modern eye as a means of enhancing cultural value.

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