MY MUSEOLOGY

While it's easily acknowledged that history has relevance for the present, and that the work of the past concerning the cultural and artistic productions bequeathed to us still carry value despite and because of their age, it's nonetheless also easily acknowledged that engagement with the past, with that which has gone, is no easy matter. Cue, then, the curatorial turn with exhibitions such as Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art and Beyond Caravaggio , both at London's National Gallery in 2016. In both we see the desire to demonstrate the relevance to our contemporary sensibilities of 'old names', a necessary abandonment of monographic technical explorations of art, and the excitement to be found in their work. So when I visit Beyond Caravaggio  later this year I expect to see appropriate references to the spontaneity and momentary immediacy of his works--that freeze-frame urgency and vivacity--and the dramatic use of light and shadow, for such references to tec...

Remembering too well engenders sadness, in which case the nearly two-year absence here ought to be lamentable. In fact I'm glad to see when, what, and how I last wrote here. For it represents a productive history, the beginning of something that can only be resumed, not undone, and it permits a brief meditation on  the feeling of seeing something of my own history unchanged in the knowledge that, while lives can be measured by the strictures of our formalisations of time (or our concessions to it), the multiplicity of my experiences and the evident continuation of my history in spite of the absence of a centralised discursive record of it frees us from over-organised perspectives on ourselves, what we've done, who we've been, and what that says about who we are. This, then, is the collapsing of a twenty-or-so-month caesura, a reconciliation of an extraneously qualified shortfall. Gently does it nudge us, too, towards thinking about history and now, and about museums as st...