Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Rating:
Summary: a text about museums in the 19th c.
Review: this book is centred on the 19th century. it explains the logic behind museums during this century drawing comparisons with the domestic interior and the work of Balzac. So its contents refers in its majority to the culture, at large, of the 19th century and how this transformed the institution of the museum during this time. Therefore it is not a text exclusively on museums but in the cultural dynamics that shaped it during that period of time.

Rating:
Summary: Congratulations
Review: To be honest: several times I felt envy reading this book. Maleuvre analysis the beginning of a museum-culture in the 18th and 19th century and does this with an extraordinary knowledge of philosophy, art and literature, especially French literature. His question of departure is: In what social context surges the museum and what impact has its birth to the relation between subject and object, the artwork. That is what a museum does: Create a distance between the individual and the sculpture. From the first to the last page the book is written on a high philosophical level, combining literature (Balzac, Proust) with philosophy (Hegel, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and others). I was reading it line by line, a pleasure that I did not have in the last months. Congratulations to the author for this brilliant opening to a very interesting field of (hopefully) other studies in the future.