Talk: “Exhibitions and Museums: When Are They Art?” at the Aesthetics Seminar, Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University

Neues Museum, Berlin, copyright: Elisa Caldarola

On February 13th 2019, I will be giving a talk at the Aesthetics Seminar in the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden.

http://www.filosofi.uu.se/kalendarium/evenemang/?eventId=42374

The title of the talk is “Exhibitions and Museums: When Art They Art?”.

Abstract: The claims that certain museum-exhibits and exhibitions are artworks or that they share significant resemblances with artworks are currently circulating in both art-theoretical and philosophical literature (see e.g. Carrier 2006; Hein 2006; Foster 2013; Ventzislavov 2014; Voorhies 2017). In the first part of my talk, I show how recent research on art-kinds and conventions in art-making (Lopes 2008; 2014; Xhignesse 2016; 2019 forthcoming) offers a framework for making sense of such claims. In the second part, I argue that some museum-exhibits and exhibitions are works of installation art.

References:

Carrier, David (2006), Museum Skepticism. A History of The Display of Art in Public Galleries, Duke University Press.

Foster, Hal (2013), The Art-Architecture Complex, Verso.

Hein, Hilde (2006), Public Art. Thinking Museums Differently, Altamira Press.

Lopes, Dominic (2008), “Nobody Needs a Theory of Art”, The Journal of Philosophy, 105(3): 109-27.

Lopes, Dominic (2014), Beyond Art, Oxford University Press.

Ventzislavov, Rossen (2014), “Idle Arts: Reconsidering The Curator”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72: 83-93.

Voorhies, James (2017), Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968, MIT Press.

Xhignesse, Michel (2016), Attempting Art: an Essay on Intention-Dependence, PhD Thesis submitted to McGill University, Montreal.

Xhignesse, Michel (2019), “What Makes a Kind an Art-Kind?”,TheBritish Journal of Aesthetics, forthcoming.

 

 

 

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Elisa Caldarola (2018), Review of “Philosophy and Museums: Essays on the Philosophy of Museums”, edited by Victoria S. Harrison, Anna Bergqvist and Gary Kemp, NDPR.

My review of this collection of essays has just been published on Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Here’s the link.

Research trip to Museion, Bolzano, Italy

On April 3rd and 4th I stayed in Bolzano to interview Letizia Ragaglia, Director of Museion – a contemporary art museum – and to discuss some aspects of my research project with Frida Carazzato and Petra Guidi – an Assistant Curator and an Exhibition Producer at Museion, respectively. Museion is currently hosting the exhibition “Installation Art”, curated by Letizia Ragaglia. My collaboration with Museion will last throughout the duration of the research project.

Museion, Bolzano, Italy – Copyright: Elisa Caldarola

By chance, I stayed at a hotel hosting its own art collection, which includes works by Kandinsky and Kokoschka. It looks like an auspicious beginning!

A volume presenting the hotel’s art collection – Copyright: Elisa Caldarola