Tiffany Sutton

Review of Ivan Gaskell’s Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory, and Art Museums (New York: Reaktion Books, 2000). If an Orlando-like epic romp through the scholarly and institutional afterlife of the painting reproduced on the cover of Ivan Gaskell’s Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory, and Art Museums is suggested by the book’s title, then this book cannot readily be judged by its cover. The cover stands a chance only once we find out what the author means by “Vermeer’s wager”: "…that it is possible by means of art to embody systematic abstract ideas that constitute methodical thought in purely visual form exclusively by means of the representation of plausible modern domesticity; and secondly, that we apprehend complex pictorial abstraction purely visually by means of the operation on the heart or soul directly through the eyes, evading language, in the manner of love" (239).

A philosophical meditation on merit and meritocracy in times when both have long been under fire and there is a pressing need to reconsider. Chapters within: 1. Running to and from BIG Monsters. 2. Grounding Merit Objectively. 3. Rethinking Meritocracy. 4. Nation, Utopia, Roots, Tradition. 5. A Summing Up. The first chapter is geared toward a general readership; chapters two through four are primarily scholarly; chapter five engages everyone. Amazon Kindle offers a free preview of the front matter and some of chapter one.

To introduce new norms for the art classification process in light of historical developments, Sutton makes a myth in the modern philosophical tradition of "state of nature" myths, and in so doing, freshly addresses the question of whether and how art history should play a role in the contemporary classification of visual art. In the making of the myth, imagination is supported with historical scholarship as well as logic. The myth upholds the variety of objects classified in the twentieth century as artworks while suggesting a set of classificatory norms more informative about art's specialness than the handwaving ceremony of artworlders that is proposed as legitimizing in institutional theories.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Taking Up Space:Museum Exploration in the Twenty-First CenturyTiffany Sutton (bio)Museums have become a crucible for questions of the role that traditional art and art history should play in contemporary art. Friedrich Nietzsche argued in the nineteenth century that museums can be no more than mausoleums for effete (fine) art.1 Over the course of the twentieth century, however, curators dispelled such blanket pessimism by showing that what keeps historical art museums, both comprehensive and modern, "alive" and relevant in the modern art world are the things that curators do with the artworks in their collections.2 In certain cases, I will argue in this article, the focus on artworks and the relationship between them can be rewardingly shifted onto the spatial aspect of the museum. I will try to show what such a shift of focus entails, show that it involves a gestalt shift (in Wittgenstein's terms, the "dawning of an aspect"), and illustrate the limits within which this can arise.3 The foremost of these limiting factors is museum architecture, and I will discuss this to the extent that it determines the limits of what curators can do. How architects do things with museums, however, lies outside the scope of this article.An Art Historical Heuristic Gets a Curatorial MakeoverNineteenth-century art museums typically were vast, labyrinthine, and built to assume the shape of a comprehensive art historical narrative, so they were easy targets for ideologues drawn to vibrant modern artworks and the controversy surrounding them. At the turn of the twentieth century new commercial galleries developed a distinctively modern mode of display in which individual artworks were showcased with plenty of space around them.4 Had existing museums changed their ways to accommodate these developments, the momentum of a new aesthetic of flatness, surface, [End Page 87] and yet purer forms of conceptualism would have been lost. It was not a time for absorption and deflation: new museums, no less monumental and historical but smaller and with fewer volumes, were commissioned to give modern art the appearance of a fresh start.5 The weightless upward mobility of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, modeled in 1945 and opened to the public in 1959, consummated this trend of the first half of the twentieth century and gave it its purest form. What the building spurt revealed was that as art changes, it demands to be reflected in its surroundings, not merely accommodated. That the response was to build new museums rather than new wings suggests the inner workings of the principle—call it "curatorial heuristic one"—that, whereas art history is fluid and simply flows forward with new developments, museums are not of this nature; they can become effete.The curatorial revision of this heuristic was a century in coming. As often happens when emerging movements are yet underdetermined, modernism suppressed in its beginnings the background factor that would seem to entail the end of modern art when finally brought into focus: the very context of display that had once set it apart. Duchamp's Readymades (1913) gave the initial nod (or wink) to the gallery context; it was, however, ignored, as a suppressed punch line, until art history was ready to concede the importance of the context of display—not in the gallery, but in the museum—to a site-specific artwork by Richard Serra: his Splashing and Prop (1968). With the museum's framing context and, concomitantly, the importance of the curator's work conceded, the barrier that had kept lesser masterpieces in the basement (or out of the museum) were removed. Unearthed, these began to circulate, and attention centered on the relation in which they stood to better-known artworks, either as suppressed alternates or as descendants of an artistic lineage. So postmodern sprawl began, with the display of multiple alternative art histories drawing, as modernism had, on available display conventions for periodizing according to internal principles (period, school, genre, style) such that detection of them devolved upon the viewer.When public uses for the new public museums began to diversify (from an historical/educational focus to aesthetic/educational and cultural/political ones), principles for ordering artworks were...

This book is an important and original contribution to the philosophy of art that bridges the disciplines of philosophy and art history. It exposes and extends a striking pattern in the way that the history of art has influenced the classification of visual art. In so doing, the author infuses the philosophy of art with needed historical scholarship and normative content, offering her own set of classificatory norms. She carefully locates her theory within a nexus of other philosophical theories that have been put forward as definitions of art, including, most notably, institutional theories. In the process, she addresses such questions as: what happens to art history and notions of the “end of art” in light of this theory, what is the process by which art candidates become legitimate art, how is it possible to prove that something is art, and how can conceptual art be understood to be legitimized and proven to be art according to the norms she introduces? Written with verve and humor, this book will interest a broad swathe of readers in the arts, art history, philosophy of art, and, in particular, it will interest philosophers interested in how logic can be used to classify visual art.