Overview

This book provides an in-depth account of the protests that shook France in 1968 and which served as a catalyst to a radical reconsideration of artistic practice that has shaped both art and museum exhibitions up to the present. Rebecca DeRoo examines how issues of historical and personal memory, the separation of public and private domains, and the ordinary objects of everyday life emerged as central concerns for museums and for artists, as both struggled to respond to the protests. She argues that the responses of the museums were only partially faithful to the aims of the activist movements. Museums, in fact, often misunderstood and misrepresented the work of artists that was exhibited as a means of addressing these concerns. Analyzing how museums and critics did and did not address the aims of the protests, DeRoo highlights the issues relevant to the politics of the public display of art that have been central to artistic representation, in France as well as in North America.

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9781107656918

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Reviews

'... The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art is a fluently written, thoroughly researched and engaging book that is laudatory in its demand for art to be understood as political and for the museum to engage with its wider public.' The Art Book '... The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The politics of Artistic display in France after 1968 is a fluently written, thoroughly researched and engaging book that is laudatory in its demand for art to be understood as political and for the museum to engage with its wider public.' The Art Book ' ... DeRoo's chapters are rather elegantly integrated to give a synthetic view of artistic and curatorial strategies in the 1970s...' Oxford Art Journal

'... The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art is a fluently written, thoroughly researched and engaging book that is laudatory in its demand for art to be understood as political and for the museum to engage with its wider public.' The Art Book '... DeRoo's chapters are rather elegantly integrated to give a synthetic view of artistic and curatorial strategies in the 1970s ...' Oxford Art Journal

'... The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art is a fluently written, thoroughly researched and engaging book that is laudatory in its demand for art to be understood as political and for the museum to engage with its wider public.' The Art Book '... DeRoo's chapters are rather elegantly integrated to give a synthetic view of artistic and curatorial strategies in the 1970s ...' Oxford Art Journal This book makes an important and welcome contribution to our understanding of the broader impact and legacy of 1968 in French art and culture. DeRoo's investigation of the politics of artistic display in the second half of the twentieth century make The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art a valuable resource for specialists and non-specialists alike. --H-France Review Although there has been a great deal of attention paid to May-June 1968 over the past forty years, accounts of events in the streets have always trumped accounts of events in the cultural sphere. ... DeRoo has done an excellent job of reconstructing and synthesizing that history. --Oxford Art Journal Although DeRoo's study focuses primarily on French art and its institutions, her methodology and findings are broadly applicable to museum studies throughout Europe and North America. Students of museum practice and theory, as well as those investigating the history of museums, will find DeRoo's book to be both a model of rigorous scholarship and an indispensable source on a seminal moment in twentieth-century museum history. --Museum and Society The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art is a fluently written, thoroughly researched, and engaging book that is laudatory in its demand for art to be understood as political and for the museum to engage with its wider public. --The Art Book

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