MY MUSEOLOGY

Awesome tranquillity pervaded my experience of the sculpture park at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, set on the coast of the Øresund in northern Zealand with views of Sweden just over the narrow stretch of water and the comfort of the museum's modernist embrace behind. Pieces by Moore, Arp, Miró and a host of others snatched my attention and breath as I trod soft thick grass and asked myself unconsciously which ways to turn and explore. This tranquillity was a singular experience, musing on which I have been inspired to think some more about curating and the purpose of an art museum. With the rise of the modern museology over recent decades refracting the view of our historical and artistic expository institutions, I am struck particularly by how much the contemporary museum is supposed to serve as a multimodal space to fit a host of purposes and reflect the diverse interests and motivations of current and potential audiences. What Louisiana showed me, however, is that--properl...

I visited the Matisse at Tate Modern for a second time last night, which I'm glad about. Last week I ran in before closing one weeknight because I was prejudiciously convinced that it wasn't an exhibition for me, but I'd felt since opening that it was something of an obligation at least to nod to it, given the name (Matisse!) and the creeping realisation that some things in life are singular and may in fact be seen or missed, not recouped. Why glad? Glad because it made me happy, and I was happy appreciating it alone with the audio guide and the relatively few anonymous participants - some alone, some in groupings - towards the later part of a late-summer evening when the humidity has passed in London but the weather hasn't approached anything like cold. There undoubtedly is a magic to the contrast of colour against a white ground, and this enlivened me, too, along with the irreality of the colour combinations, the shapes, the adjacencies of motifs, the scale and r...

Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns, these five artists embraced, revelled in, loved chance, yet the show devoted to their work, interrelationships and mutual influences is an explicitly scripted experience. Rather than curated, however, it is a mise-en-scène by Philippe Parreno, a noteworthy distinction. Curating is an indefinable business in today's theoretical universe, so it is hardly surprising, and, given the five artists' penchant for the aleatory, it is fitting that the guide should point out in this indirect way the instability of the term. This mise-en-scène is scripted, however, from the entrance-level beginning to first-floor development, where the sections of the gallery space are numbered 1 to 8 beginning with the area immediately to the left of the top of the stairs. That the artists were so committed to chance, however, does not preclude an ordered exhibition from being a worthwhile and appropriate forum for their work. Order enables participants ...