Person: Gaskell, Ivan
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Gaskell
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Gaskell, Ivan
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Publication Display(Bloomsbury Academic, 2011) Gaskell, IvanThe display of religious objects takes many forms. While sculpture on the exterior of religious buildings is visible for the long term, relics, cult images, and masquerades are shown only occasionally. One way of emphasizing the potency of an object is to reveal it infrequently. In many religious systems display is restricted, for some things are dangerous to inappropriate viewers, while others are too powerful to be seen by anyone. When access is possible, viewers value intimate encounter, usually drawing as close as possible to sacred objects. Some are small enough to be worn as amulets close to the body. On ceremonial occasions, such as processions or masquerades, devotees may compete for the privilege of carrying sacred objects. Access is usually hierarchically privileged or controlled. Those with hieratic functions—priests, elders, shamans, vow-makers, museum curators—usually enjoy the most intimate access to sacred materials, whether displayed or concealed. Priests often have exclusive access to parts of a sacred structure containing numinous materials, and museum donors pay for the privilege of exhibition tours with curators during closed hours. Intimacy of access signals status, and display reinforces social distinctions and hierarchies. However, to reduce the display of sacred material to this function alone would be misleading. The three case studies that follow—all set in Trafalgar Square, London—illustrate the variety of associations that sacred objects can have, even when displayed within yards of each other.Publication Charles LeDray(Foundation for International Art Criticism, 2010) Gaskell, IvanPublication Some Cherokee and Chitimacha baskets: problems of interpretation(2008) Gaskell, IvanPublication Encountering Pacific Art(Museum Ethnographers Group, 2009) Gaskell, IvanPublication In Search of Christian Miraculous Images in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Beyond(University of Tokyo, 2010) Gaskell, IvanPublication Spilt Ink: Aesthetic Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Art(Oxford University Press, 2012) Gaskell, IvanIn response to globalization, is there to be a single, homogeneous set of aesthetic values governing the production and consumption of art? The article focuses on a newcomer to globalized contemporary art, China. It suggests that artworld art (encompassed by the artworld institutions of commerce, museums, and the academy) is far from the only art currently produced. Art beyond the artworld, whether commercial or religious, is important to many people worldwide. It describes four kinds of art currently made in China. Three are artworld art (Modernist, traditional, and avantHgarde), one is non-artworld (mass commercial). Connections exist among them. Further, it argues that practices in all four conform to expectations globally that Chinese art of all kinds should exemplify imitation, emulation, and copying. Such conformity entails what Winnie Wong has termed ‘staging Chineseness’. The article concludes with an examination of this process in two recent exhibitions before proposing that a proliferation of a variety of values is unavoidable while contemporary artworld practitioners continue to introduce local concerns, and while the self-claimed high status of artworld art is progressively challenged by the vitality worldwide of non-artworld art. While some of these values are resistant to Western globalizing homogenization, others conform to it.Publication Museums and Philosophy--Of Art, and Many Other Things. Part 1.(Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) Gaskell, IvanThe philosophical discussion of art is seemingly endless, whereas that of museums is scant indeed. My focus in this twoApart article is on museums as a whole rather than art in museums. Museums, after all, deal with much more than art. Why should philosophers be interested in museums? One reason is that museums remain significant generators and distributors of knowledge claims in a wide variety of fields of inquiry. This remains the case even though they may have been overshadowed in certain respects by other institutions of scholarship. Although few philosophers have addressed museums, many theorists have done so. Although much theorizing about museums has a Continental flavor, little is philosophically oriented. I shall not directly address the vast literature on museums by theorists of various persuasions, for a plethora of commentaries is already available. Instead, I offer discussions of philosophical issues concerning museums under three headings in Part 1—Cultural Variety, Taxonomy, and Epistemology—and a further three in Part 2—Teleology, Ethics, and Therapeutics and Aesthetics.Publication Museums and Philosophy--Of Art, and Many Other Things. Part 2.(Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) Gaskell, IvanThis two-part article examines the very limited engagement by philosophers with museums, and proposes analysis under six headings: cultural variety, taxonomy, and epistemology in Part I, and teleology, ethics, and therapeutics and aesthetics in Part II. The article establishes that fundamental categories of museums established in the 19th century – of art, of anthropology, of history, of natural history, of science and technology – still persist. Among them, it distinguishes between hegemonic (predominantly Western) and subaltern (minority or Indigenous) museums worldwide. It argues that relations between hegemonic and subaltern museums are often agonistic, and are compromised by claims of universalism on the part of proponents of the former. The article observes that most discussion of museums focuses exclusively and misleadingly on their public exhibition function, and contends that scholarship – not exhibition – is central to all museums. However, that predominantly taxonomic scholarship, while innovative and central to a dominant epistemology based on the observation of tangible things in the 19th century, was compromised by the epistemic shift to abstraction and experimentation in the 20th, which resulted in a loss of initiative and authority. Although epistemological changes currently in progress favor a renewed attention to tangible things as complex matrices to which museums ought to contribute significantly, the fundamental taxonomy of museums by collection type is a clog on the ability of museum scholars to engage with and themselves produce big ideas. In order to function well as sites of scholarship in the future, museums will have to be far more adaptable and attentive to a wider range of things and ideas (including Indigenous ideas incompatible with Western assumptions) than their existing collection divisions permit. Museums and philosophy do not seem readily to go together. Few philosophers have attended seriously to museums, and few museum scholars have explored philosophical issues. Philosophers have only occasionally set foot in museums in such a way as to leave a trace. In 1990, Jacques Derrida curated the exhibition Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines (“Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins”) from the holdings of the Department of Graphic Arts of the Musée du Louvre. It was the first in a series entitled Parti pris (“Taking Sides”) organized by curator Régis Michel, but the only one by a philosopher.1 Even so, Derrida’s focus was the blind, visionaries, and the European mythical foundation of drawing, not the museum or museums as such. In “Museums and Philosophy – Of Art, and Many Other Things Part I,” I broached the issue of why philosophy and museums should have so little to do with each other, avoiding one another even when scholars from each institution, such as Derrida and Michel, chose to work together closely. I suggested that perhaps in the 19th century museums were too self-evidently sites of scholarship to attract philosophical attention, whereas in the 20th and beyond their precipitate fall from epistemological grace has rendered them irrelevant. Among museum scholars, devotion to a governing discipline from among an A to Z of appropriate fields – from anthropology to zoology – has precluded any serious involvement with philosophy in all but a very few cases. I explored these matters, and why philosophers might have good reason to engage with museums, under three headings: Cultural Variety, Taxonomy, and Epistemology; and continue the exploration here under a further three: Teleology, Ethics, and Therapeutics and Aesthetics.Publication Jesus Christ as the Divine Mercy by Eugeniusz Kazimirowski: The Most Influential Polish Painting of the Twentieth Century?(Slovak Academic Press, 2009) Gaskell, Ivan