An Institutional Arrangements : The Politics of Art Museums

My inquiry examines art's institutional arrangements through the present character of modern and contemporary art museums. This examination is positioned initially with the postmodernist theoretical evaluation of the art museum which argues the rupture of the modernist art episteme signaled the end of the museum and the project of constructing art's history. I limited my inquiry to museums located in major art centers across the globe, the places and spaces that have defined the sphere of twentieth century art. These museums share national and historically influential platforms. Attracting the largest, most economically diverse audiences the museums I am interested in also define best practices for the preservation, collection and display of twentieth-century and contemporary art. The inclusion of performance art in museum collections and exhibitions allowed me to assess the museum's space of interpretation and purported reforms since the postmodern critique. What I draw from the different strategies to include and recognize performance is a desire for a synthetic theory and method of performance collection and presentation that remains committed to the modernist foundations of museum practice. Important questions that target the arbitrary origins of these criteria and recognize the interpretive constraints on performance art remain unanswered as the museum carves a marginalized space for performance art in the institution. The myopic strategies that do not engage museum practices in Chapter One are shaped by the postmodern criticism that locates the site of museum critique only in the image or work of art. In Chapter Two, I retrace dominant postmodernist critiques of the museum to demonstrate that an artwork-centered criticism foreclosed any possibility to fully consider the museum's instrumentality of producing particular epistemological systems. Instead, an impetuous evaluation of the museum is put forth through a reactionary dialecticism that is constructed between modernist and postmodernist art. Postmodernist critics champion modernist negation, pointing to the dissolution of mediums through multimedia work, or the use of new production strategies like photographic reproduction. However, what is posited in this reactionary negation is an equally authoritative, unitary criterion. A commitment to a democratized, egalitarian