Visual art management
PROF. ANNALISA DE CURTIS
COURSE AIMS
The aim of the course is to study museums as present-day institutions and as a
means of experiencing human action in the world. Students will be taught how to
understand the main means of designing modern-day museums, exhibitions and
site-specific installations. Cultural management and planning requires a knowledge
and understanding of the underlying philosophy behind the latest museological
approaches at the basis of any contemporary installation and, hence, any cultural
enterprise offered to and acknowledged by the general public and critics.
COURSE CONTENT
Exploring the relationship between content and exhibition area through:
The overview on the modern-day museums by analysing how these ones have been
improved as public space.
The evaluation of the need for modernisation and redevelopment by leaving the
aesthetic category of contemporaneity that varies without changing.
The first part of the course – on what museums have become - focuses on the
various ways in which a new kind of museography has gradually taken hold in
Europe. Museum Design is facing a structural change in the aims and methods of
museology, since the very concept of a museum is being extended in terms of its
meaning and purposes. Studies are focusing on the relationship between the
foundamentals (principles of invariance at all period in time) and new foundations
(signs of variance in terms of their recognisability and sense of belonging to the
present).
The second part - on what museums could become – considers how museums have
been developing and their ability to embrace the unexpected (transience). This
second part will be carried out by looking at a number of case studies on how
museographic forms have been updated. The contents will move beyond the
museum as a passive chronological-hagiographic pathway or system of specific
collections. It will be highlighted a more composite layout deriving from the
change that is taking place in the “culture industry” and also the rise of new private
institutions proposing a different approach and alternative aims deriving from
strategies developed by companies/foundations interested in representing
themselves through art.
Thus, there are new museological layouts and museographic forms, which derive
from the need to pay testimony to historical events of great ethical and civil
significance. This approach will introduce new languages and opportunities. For
this reasons, the third part of the course sets out to complete the overview of case
studies by reflecting on the standardisation of the relations between recollectionmemory-history-the present by visiting a museum facility in Milan that is currently
being completed.
READING LIST
G. AGAMBEN, Che cos’è il contemporaneo?, Nottetempo, Roma, 2008
V. NEWHOUSE, Towards a New Museum, The Monacelli Press, New York, 1998.
J. PUTNAM, Art and Artifact. The Museum as Medium, Thames and Hudson, London, 2009.
K. MCSHINE, The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, MoMA-Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1999.
M. AUGÈ, Rovine e macerie. Il senso del tempo, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2003.
U. RIVA, Memoriale della Shoah Milano. Né un abbandono, né un commento in “Abitare”, n. 530,
marzo 2013, pp. 62-73.
A. DE CURTIS-G. MORPURGO, Il Memoriale della Shoah di Milano: infrastruttura tra documento e
progetto, in C. COZZA-I. VALENTE (edited by), La freccia del tempo. Ricerche e progetti di
architettura delle infrastrutture, Pearson Italia, Milano-Torino, 2014, pp. 68-74.
S. SURIANO, La testimonianza dell’invisibile. Il Memoriale della Shoah di Milano, in “Engramma–
Architetture per la memoria”, n.123, gennaio 2015.
TEACHING METHOD
Key words: lectures, conversations, discussion of case studies ….
The first part of the course will be taught in lectures; the second part will consist of a
discussion of selected case studies and, finally, a trip to a new museum facility in Milan
currently being completed, followed by an on-site seminar.
ASSESSMENT METHOD
Continuous assessment in two successive stages.
The first stage, a seminar during which students will be asked to create a manifesto for a
museum, supplementing their own thoughts with specific topics studied at lectures and other
planned activities. They will hand in a concise report (2 pages) to the lecturer summarising
the main subjects they have examined.
The second stage, the final individual examination, will consist of a discussion of the subject
matter of the lectures, the intermediate seminar and reading list.