aesthetics

I’ve spent some time last week watching, in fascination, Buenos Aires-based photographer Irina Werning’s “Back to the future”, a series of juxtapositions of images of individuals at different ages. She finds people who have portraits of themselves as a young child (not very difficult, most of us have) and then re-enacts the portrait with a contemporary version of the same person placed in […]

Two weeks ago, I attended a one-day conference in Copenhagen entitled ”The City is the Machine: Sociological and Architectural Perspectives on Spaces of the City, Materiality and Sociality” (orig.: “Byen er maskinen: Sociologiske og arkitektoniske perspektiver på byens rum, materialitet og socialitet”). The panel of speakers comprised two architects, a literary theorist and three sociologists, […]

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize! Just over 15 years ago, […]

I just received a call for papers from Craig Howes — the indefatigable promoter of all-things-biographical at the University of Hawaii — for an international conference on ‘Aesthetic Lives’ at the Université Montpellier, 23-24 September 2011. The preamble is alluring: In 1873, citing Hegel’s vision of the Greeks, Walter Pater wrote in The Renaissance: ‘They are great and […]

This session at the conference in September circled around the role of art in the museum, and how museums and artists can and should work together. The first speaker, Karen Ingham, emphasized that the concept of art in museums essentially refers to interdisciplinary happenings and should always be a product of dialogue. She talked about […]

The challenge of how to display fetal bodies was attacked from very different angles at the September conference. Morten Skydsgaard introduced us to the exhibition The incomplete child, in which the idea was to show the deviant body in its own right. He emphasized the importance, especially in controversial displays, of giving the visitors time […]

Ugh! Last week I visited New York. What really spoke to my senses and touched my emotions in a provocative and morbid way was a toe-curling exhibition of works by the American artist Paul Thek (1933-1988) at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. To be honest the works on display managed to freak me out […]

Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein’s presentation at the conference on “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month was about the politics of knowledge production, with medical museums as a case study. One of Roger’s arguments was that the museums, by placing their historical objects in new, global contexts, […]