Elizabeth Licata wrote:

> This is an interesting topic. Our director teaches Museum Studies and
> has always said that the MFA students in the class are by far more
> interested and responsive to the issues she brings up than the art
> history students.

They are also usually the first to drop out of a museum studies program.

When I was in an MFA program they would invite the art historians to our
weekly "crits". These were pretty all-out affairs and it wasn't unusual
for participants to be reduced to tears. Few art historians came but, of
course, one I had at the time in Russian Art history did.  The result
was that I passed an art history course I was not doing particularly
well in according to traditional art historical practice. The professor
was insightful enough to see that I was approaching very complex
problems from another, more physical, direction and had worked out my
own kind of research methods, methods not unrelated to the artists she
was lecturing about. She could also see that I'd aborbed a great deal of
her lectures and used the information as practice rather than theory. (I
was particularly fond of Larinov and Gohcharova at the time, artists she
introduced me to in her lectures).

Stephen Greenblatt has a good essay in "Exhibiting Cultures" (available
from your local AAM bookstore) where he talks about the difference
betwen resonance and wonder as models for exhibition. In the end he
states: "For both the poetics and the politics of representation are
most completely fulfilled in the experience of wonderful resonance and
resonant wonder."

Museums should be experts in presenting the hybrid. Art historians, no
matter what their field, should have a grasp of contemporary art
practice because it reflects on their subject, and artists should, in
return, understand art history, and museum practice. Then, maybe, the
rest of the world will benefit from that continuous surface.

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