Manet, museum, modernism: Michel Foucault and modernist art history

Abstract

Michel Foucault’s legacy in shaping understanding of the museum and its ideological operations is well established in the field of museum studies. Tony Bennett s adaptation of the disciplinary complex in his exhibitionary complex essay of 1988 marshalled Foucauldian theory into the field s mainstream, and contributed to the subsequent methodological shift known as the new museology or critical museum studies. Less recognised are Foucault s contributions to theorisations of the museum by modernist art history. Focusing on a passage from his essay Fantasia of the Library and its reception by Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, and others, this article reflects on Foucault s outsized impact on recent modernist art history. It concludes that Foucault’s commentary stimulated art history to engage with the museum, but at the same time, constrained the field s conception of modernism’s geographies, protagonists, and institutional formations.

Keywords

• michel foucault
• douglas crimp
• modernism
• museum studies
• institutional critique
• global art history