From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius is a Freelance Art Historian and Associate Lecturer in History of Art in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck College. Before her arrival in the UK in 1993, she was Curator of Italian Paintings (1981-90) and Chief Curator at The National Museum in Warsaw (1992-93). She was called back to this Museum to work as its Deputy Director (2009-11). Among her publications are National Museum in Warsaw Guide: Galleries and Study Collections (2001) and Kantor was Here: Tadeusz Kantor in Great Britain (2011). Piotr Piotrowski was Professor ordinarius in the Art History Department at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, which he chaired between 1999-2008. He was also the co-editor of the annual journal Artium Quaestiones (1994-2009), Director of the National Museum in Warsaw (2009-2010), and Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Museum in Poznań (1992-1997). Among his publications are In the shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe (2009) and Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (2012).

’This important and original collection of writings about art museums picks up where the critique of museums, begun three decades ago, left off. That critique uncovered the imperialist, racist and patriarchal values that shaped museums of the past. The professionals and art historians contributing to this volume, several of them from eastern Europe, offer fresh, new models of museum reform, models designed to make museums more democratic, self-critical and enlightening, and more pertinent to the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life.’ Carol Duncan, Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA and author of Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums

• Introduction, Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Piotr Piotrowski; Part I Histories; Chapter 1 A Very Brief History of the Art Museum in the United States (Focusing Mainly But Not Exclusively on the Nineteenth Century), Alan Wallach; Chapter 2 ‘The Contemporary Museum is a Laboratory of Knowledge’, Andrzej Turowski; Chapter 3 Wilhelm R. Valentiner’s Reshaping Museums in the Spirit of the New Age (1919) and its Reception, Monika Flacke; Chapter 4 Myth and Reality of the White Cube, Charlotte Klonk; Chapter 5 Jerzy Ludwi?ski’s Testing of the Dysfunction of the Museum, Magdalena Zió?kowska; Part II Tools: Objects, Space, Viewing Practices; Chapter 6 Masterpieces and the Critical Museum, Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius; Chapter 7 From the White Cube to a Critical Museography, J. Pedro Lorente; Chapter 8 From the Inside Looking Out, Penelope Curtis; Chapter 9 Making the National Museum Critical, Piotr Piotrowski; Chapter 10 Historical Space and Critical Museologies, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett; Chapter 11 Museums that Listen and Care? Central Europe and Critical Museum Discourse, Mária Orišková; Chapter 12 Towards Embodied, Agonistic Museum Viewing Practices in Contemporary Manchester, England, Alpesh Kantilal Patel; Part III Critique; Chapter 13 The Context and Practice of Post-critical Museology, Victoria Victoria Walsh; Chapter 14 ‘Is the Contemporary Already Too Late?’ (Re-)producing Criticality within the Art Museum, Jacob Birken; Chapter 15 Neuromuseology, John Onians;