Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums - Tapa blanda

One of the major themes of this important book [is] the idea that modern works of art are created with an intuitive awareness that they are destined from the outset to come to rest in museums, earning a place in tomorrow's judgment of what happened yesterday or today, in what the author calls the future's past...Fisher's ideas are challenging and provocative, informed and wide-ranging, and they take into account the broad picture of modernism while providing in-depth and convincing descriptions of its specific manifestations.--Carl Belz "Boston Globe "

Philip Fisher charts the pivotal role the museum has played in modern culture, revealing why it has become central to industrial society and how, in turn, artists have adapted to the museum's growing power, shaping their works with the museum in mind. He explores how, over the last two centuries, museums have presented art objects outside their original context, effacing them, in order to represent them in a sequential ordering of styles. It is this sequence that artists such as Jasper Johns and Frank Stella have mirrored, even parodied. This book is an important contribution to our understanding of modern art and culture.