The museum and temporalization

Abstract

More than any other institution, the museum is preoccupied with time, perpetually creating, contesting, and regaining it. From the collections of ancient art amassed in mid-14th-century Italy to the contemporary galleries without their own collections, the museum has always been a leading force in shaping Western civilization’s perceptions of time. After a survey of the history of Europe’s museums, the article traces the configurations of temporality that have arisen in different periods. Beginning in the 15th century, museums exhibited recent art alongside classical masterpieces, highlighting the cleavage between new and old. Three and a half centuries later, however, the art of the present was proclaimed a contemporary of the art of the past and the future, a notion upheld in spite of the outpourings of revolutionary pathos. It was in the second half of the 20th century that this synchronizing tendency yielded to the domination of the one and only present, which remains in force today. This new and challenging situation could be a starting point for the reassessment of contemporary museums’ role in influencing and realizing social temporality.