Quatremere/Benjamin/Marx: Art Museums, Aura, and Commodity Fetishism
Author(s)
Sherman, Daniel J.
Abstract
The concept of the art museum as “a metaphor… for the anarchical production of commodities in fully developed bourgeois society” has become a discourse, a pervasive critique of the museum and its practices. Museum s are seen to deprive objects of the life proper to them, for “museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art. They testify to the neutralization of culture.” In their pervasiveness and inevitability, museums monopolize certain fields of vision, and thus constitute a strategy of power linked to hegemonic capitalism. The critical commentary of Quatremere de Quincy is made sensible through Karl Marx’s concept of fetishization and Benjamin Walter’s contemporary dialectical perspective on art.
