Synopses & Reviews
Since public museums came into being in the late 18th century, artists have looked upon them with a mixture of reverence, complicity, suspicion, and disdain. In this book, which accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, artists of many persuasions speak their minds about museums, their functions and spaces, their practices and politics, and their relationship to the art they contain.
More than 60 artists are represented by a wide range of works: photographs of museum patrons by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Elliot Erwitt; "personal museums" and "cabinets of curiosities" by Charles Willson Peale, Marcel Duchamp, and Claes Oldenburg; fantasies of the destruction or transformation of museums by Hubert Robert, Edward Ruscha, and Christo; and much more, including works created especially for this project by contemporary artists. An anthology of statements and writings by artists about museums is included.