In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde: An Anthropologist Investigates the Contemporary Art Museum
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde: An Anthropologist Investigates the Contemporary Art Museum Details
Review “Bunzl shines rays of welcome transparency into museums' heretofore hidden byways. His approach is akin to an anthropological study of indigenous tribes, only the tribe here is MCA's staff. His embedded look as an invited observer, free of museums' self-promoting rhetoric, is a valuable contribution to both museology and public awareness.” (Chicago Tribune)“Insightful.” (Artnet)“An important, lucid, and miraculously easy-reading contribution to the ethnography of art” (Sarah Thornton, author of Seven Days in the Art World)“With page-turning drama and great wit, Bunzl gives us a rare look behind the glamour of the contemporary art scene. His engaging analysis reveals how museum professionals work hard to manage the classic tension between art and money–a tension which has reached epic proportions in neoliberal America. Anyone concerned about the future of avant-garde art under capitalism should read this book.” (Jessica Winegar, author of Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt)“Not since Debora Silverman's 1986 Selling Culture, near the beginning of America's neoliberal era, has there been such a delicious, astute, and acutely observed account of the cultural economy of contemporary art museums, now in the full maturation of that era. Embedded ethnographically among the curators of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, as much managerial mediators as connoisseurs of the new, Bunzl ranges widely, and in so doing redeems the idea of an avant-garde in an art system that so degrades it.” (George E. Marcus, coeditor of The Traffic In Culture)“The pleasure of Bunzl’s engaging account, I suspect, lies . . . in its invitation to peek behind the scenes of an institution that works assiduously to manage its public profile. . . . It stands as a compelling and persuasive set of insights into the struggles that today animate museums of contemporary art.” (Museum Anthropology Review) Read more About the Author Matti Bunzl is professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. He is the author of Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna and Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe. Read more
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