What determines the significance of a work of art? Does it abide eternally within the work? Or is it continually constructed and reconstructed from the outside, through the work's presentation? The historical shift from autonomous modernist object to post-modernist critique of institutions, from artwork to discursive context, is the subject of the essays and photographs in this study. Taking the museum as the paradigmatic institution of artistic modernism, this book surveys its historical origins and current transformations. The new paradigm of post-modernism is elaborated through analyses of art practices broadly conceived - not only the practices of artists but also those of critics and curator, of international exhibitions and of new or refurbished museums.

Author Biography

Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester. He is the author of On the Museum's Ruins and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, both published by the MIT Press.