Notes on the Exhibition

<p>How is it, given the huge popularity enjoyed by museums and exhibitions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, that the Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13) (of all people) can speak of the “obsolescence of the exhibition”? Recent decades have seen an unprecedented increase in the building of museums and the founding of biennials—institutions that enjoy high visitor counts and attract no less attention in the media and in art discourse. How can this success be explained? And are there, nonetheless, grounds for viewing it as a sign of the exhibition’s growing obsolescence?</p> <p>Historically speaking, the success story of the exhibition is no new phenomenon; rather, it reflects an ongoing development that began more than two hundred years ago. Museums and exhibitions, with their focus on the material object, emerged parallel to our modern industrialized civil societies. Of course, objects played a role in aristocratic and courtly cultures—as symbols of taste, status, and wealth. But they were integral to an aesthetic of style and manners and functioned as the accessories of a subject intent on aesthetic refinement. In civil society, by contrast, the object takes center stage. It steps into a direct relation to the subject for whom it was formerly but an ornamental extra. Museums and exhibitions, loci basically for the viewing of objects, are instrumental in this process. This was and still is the case for world expositions, the Louvre, and documenta. They are sites of meaning production, aesthetic experience, and (self-)reflection— processes that are bound up with the material object vis-à-vis a viewing subject. Hence, to inquire into the success of museums and exhibitions automatically entails inquiring into the status of things. How is it that things in modern civil societies are so meaningful that modern temples and rituals are dedicated to them?…</p>