In her essay The Museum as a Way of Seeing, art historian Svetlana Alpers emphasized museum’s function of transferring the cultural objects’ value into a visual form for, in her words, ‘attentive looking’. From Alpers’s perspective, the representation of museum could be encouraging yet worrying at the same time. In a way, it has confined an object’s value but on the other hand, motivated the viewers to uncover the expected.

Alpers took a personal approach at first. A crab, from a museum visit in her childhood, whose body parts were isolated by the museum for display, aroused her concerns about how museums turned a being into one of visual interest. To address it she then turned to a tradition in European museums to treat their collection as visible crafts. At the same time, some artworks, in a challenging form several painters took, depicted nature objects in the very detail, involving themselves in the museum’s system.

Following that, Alpers continued with the notion of ‘the museum effect’, which strengthens the visual value of a work and thus creates a firm link to a certain context. however, she suggested we work with it. Then Alpers made an opposite argument concerning the genre of Dutch art she specialised in. With an example of an exhibition that adopted a chronological and alphabetical methodology of installing, she noted that Dutch artists were too devoted to a broader recording to have their works be categorized based on historic events. Nevertheless, a chronological arrangement can still take effect, as she added, for that the progressive practices, though out of self-conscious, sometimes proceeded over time.

Carrying on her discussion in a modern period, Alpers referred to Musée d'Orsay for a transformation in exhibition. Their way of exhibiting had decreased the visual interest of the pictures, questioned by Alpers based on her assumption that an object, situated in museums, was by all means deemed to be seen, regardless of their given visual effect. However, it didn’t have to affect their cultural meaning. This point of view had further supported her considering museums as a secondary institution when it came to education.

In the last part of her essay, Alpers started to focus on museums’ function in art display and educating. To her, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) managed to obtain a balance. When the way of hanging a picture and that of providing information were contrasting, MoMA used an extra room for information and documents. In addition, Alpers also paid attention to new possibilities for installation. And offering extra information paper might prove effective.

When approaching an end, Alpers had again underlined the significance of the way of seeing, regarding in which position we perceived particular objects. She turned a little dispirited as her conclusion seemed to reveal a fact that values outside the objects visual nature might be largely overlooked in the context of the museum, within which, however, still lied new possibilities to be uncovered.

Bibliography:

1. Svetlana, A. (1991) ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in Ivan, K. and Steven, L. (ed.) Exhibiting cultures: the poetics of museum display. London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 25-32.