"Revoking the Experience of Modernity That Has Descended Upon These Paintings"

"When a painting was taken off the wall of the church and brought into the gallery of the museum, we were asked to look at it differently than the artist intended. Broken out of its original lifeworld and turned into a fragment (this is the original crime Adorno speaks of), the artwork became secular, a relic of another time and place, patched together with relics from other times and places. ('It would be an act of madness to enter a museum, kneel down before a painting of the virgin to pray for a soldier missing in battle, lighting a candle and leaving an offering on the floor near the picture before leaving,' Philip Fisher noted in 1975.) It is lost and adrift, yes, but it is also transformed, and here we find the other edge of the sword: One begins to draw connections the artist never imagined. That is the quixotic, heady power of the museum, the birth of which, one might go so far as to say, demands the death of the author. No works made before 1860 were meant to be contemplated in quite the same way—as Foucault reminds us, Manet was the first painter to imagine his paintings in the museum—but nothing that goes into it can resist its power. In this sense the museum is akin to the commodity system, another modern invention: Artworks confront all other artworks within its space. Inside, they change orientation, speak differently, take on new lives, assume new values. The viewer is charged with wondering about their potential, purchase, and power."

Alex Kitnick at Artforum discusses "the discontent with museums."