Notes on exhibition history in curatorial discourse

Abstract

In 1999 the Clark Institute organized a much-discussed conference entitled The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University 1 , the theme of which was the supposed gap between art history in museum and university contexts respectively.The organizers intended to examine the prejudice that academic art history is interested too much in theory and neglects the object, while the museum is primarily occupied with questions of funding and audiences, creating low expectations of its research.Whether this situation has since improved or intensified is not a question I am able to answer, instead I would like to speak about a related problem that concerns not art history as a whole but which, following the Clark conference, we might refer to as The Two Exhibition Histories.What concerns me here is mainly the discourse surrounding the exhibition which has established itself beyond the university, but also largely outside of the museum, and which I will provisionally entitle the 'curatorial discourse of exhibition history'.2 It is striking that the topic of the exhibition-and thus also its history-has only been properly established as a subject of research in the last twenty years, and particularly within the past decade, both within art history and in related fields.Publications, conferences, research projects, university courses and journals testify to this.Since 2011 Central Saint Martins College in London even offers a postgraduate MA course in 'Exhibition Studies'.Each academic year six or seven students study on the program, only a fraction of them with a background in art history, and many from the fields of fine arts, design or curatorial studies.

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