SubStance

The question of authenticity in art appears historically and directly linked to the question of art's place and the modalities of its placement. The protracted practice of removal and collection of authentic works of art in a sequestered place, of which the art museum is the modern manifestation, is directly linked, in turn, to Western ideational trepidations about art and representation. To trace these links, I will begin with an overview of the history of the place and the placement of art, beginning with the cabinet of curiosities, to the founding of the art museum as a building type in Berlin during the third decade of the 19th century. The elaborate spacing and the experiential journey of disjointure that were codified in Berlin and since have been the persistent measures of success in art museum design are, I contend, a humanist institutional response to the enigmatic place of art and its inherent supplemental and paradoxical character as a mode of representation. The fabrication of the art museum as a disjoined space is, persistent as it has been, a cultural substitute for what is fundamentally missing and missed: an outside to representation. As an institution and a building type, the art museum effectively fabricates an outside to representation. It substitutes a formal, spatial, and experiential clarity of place for the very spatial and temporal dimensions that painting and sculpture fundamentally put in question. The institution of the art museum is, I contend, an instituted resistance to representation. Spacing is authenticity's indispensable alibi. The museum is its incessant realization.

I. A Place for Art

Museums are, as one contemporary account has it, "really last-ditch solutions to the problem of knowing what to do with artworks when they have been moved from their original homes for any number of reasons" (Bossaglia 1990: 287). It is, we are told, "really as desperate as that. Our civilization has come up with no better solution than to pigeonhole artworks and lock them safely away" (ibid.).

Curious as this determination may be, it speaks to the same logic as the following account ascribing the inception of the museum to two causes: "a level of physical wealth which allows an abundant production of art," and "a form of culture in which this art is seen as a kind of surplus not immediately wanted in [End Page 61] any everyday secular or religious activity" (Brawne 1965: 8). Both accounts assume, and theirs is a pervasive assumption, that the museum is a response to a spatial displacement. Presuming that those works of art that fall outside "everyday secular or religious activity" or "their original homes" present a "problem," both see the museum as a solution, desperate or otherwise, to arts' want of a place—i.e., of having to have a designated place. Once displaced, works of art have to be re-placed, and not in any place, but a place that, according to another account, "must surely be set apart in the sense of being a special place, where life takes on a different dimension and there is time and space to think and feel, and room for . . . silence" (Powel 1991, X). This relocation is relatively recent and western in origin.¹

Unlike the library and the theater with their long history of development, the art museum is little more than 200 years old. It dates back to the Decree issued by the Revolutionary Convention in Paris on July 27, 1793 for the creation of the "Museum of the Republic" at the Louvre. It opened on November 9, 1793.² The spatial and formal consequences of this act were not to be fully realized at the Louvre for another 190 years. Elsewhere, the spatial and formal development of the museum as a building type had to await the heated debates and final codification of the type in Germany and, to a lesser extent, in England, in the decades of 1810s to 1830s.

The constitution of the "Musée Central des Arts," as the museum at the...