The Discipline of Pleasure; or, How Art history Looks at the Art Museum

摘要

Since entering that complex realm known as 'public space', British art museums havetended to be associated with the problematic relationship between value and use. In additionto their status as places of aesthetic refuge, conservation and contemplation, they have beenidentified as environments where specific practices are measured: the display of socialbehaviour, the rituals of leisure and the performance of the visit are important componentsin the history of the visibility of these cultural institutions in part as managerial systems andsites of social assembly.The central aim of this essay is to generate a critically detailed and fully historicisedreading of one specific example of the institutionalisation of visual culture. By attending to itscomplexity as an aesthetic, social and managerial space, I want to examine how the act ofseeing was inscribed in a body of material concerned with the National Gallery (NG) in mid-Victorian London. Addressing the language of exhibition, this essay deals with a form ofcommentary where writing about the public display of art becomes another way of exploringthe mnemonic or kinetic qualities of space. This work asks: what is caught in this fascinationwith the spatial logics of the gallery. What is formed by the development of an institutionalprocess which seeks the ideal illumination of art. What is registered in the new systems ofvisual authority that begin to emerge in the 1840s and 1850s. What is caught, blocked ordisplayed by this new interest in seeing in the NG a visual network of interlocking narrativesabout the historical development of art