Before class next week, I’d like us to return to a few ideas from Ways of Seeing. Each of our first two events (Alexandra Pirici Performance at the Highline and the “AIDS at Home” exhibit at the MCNY) foregrounded the politics of place and space both today and in the not-so-distant past.

The following quotes from Ways of Seeing resonated with me in relation to those events and our visit to the Brooklyn Museum this week:

“History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to a mystification of the past.” (11)

“Because works of art are reproducible, they can, theoretically, be used by anybody. Yet mostly…reproductions are still used to bolster the illusion that nothing has changed, that art, with its unique undiminished authority, justifies most other forms of authority, that art makes inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling.” (29)

“A people or a class which us cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history. This is why–and this is the only reason why–the entire art of the past has now become a political issue.” (33)

(How) Do you see these ideas being expressed or embodied in the places and spaces we’ve experienced together so far this semester?