Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and Modern Museum

Sobre el libro Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and Modern Museum de Marcia Brennan publicado por MIT al 2010:

"In this wonderful study of the curator James Johnson Sweeney, Marcia Brennan takes us back to Sweeney´s mystical exhibitions of modern art and makes a case for an art history that can discern the color behind the color, the light behind the light." —Alexander Nemerov, Department of the History of Art, Yale University "The recent scholarly dismantling of modernism´s rhetoric of purity has moved at a snail´s pace; but now, plunging into this deconstructing discourse, comes Marcia Brennan´s Curating Consciousness, a study which supplies greater momentum to the entire project. Brennan not only discovers such a seminal modernist figure as Duchamp embedding his work in mystical terms; she also places such important figures of modernism´s museological history as James Johnson Sweeney and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., squarely at the center of her narrative of modernism´s spiritual dynamic. It was especially Sweeney, Brennan finds, who in his spatial and literary presentations of modernist art authoritatively made the modern museum serve this spiritual agenda, to summon the invisible into sensible presence." —Kathleen Pyne, Professor of Art History, University of Notre Dame, author of Art and the Higher Life and Modernism and the Feminine Voice "This book is proof that the best art history is simply careful and astute inquiry. Brennan elegantly recuperates Sweeney as the oracle of coincidentiae oppositorum: the admissible and desirable contradictions that drove so much of mid-century Modernist creative thinking. These were the kinds of beautiful but elusive contradictions that compelled artists to step outside the safety zone of pure corporeality so that they might breach the dangerous spaces between the physical and the metaphysical, the formal and the transcendental, the visible and the invisible." —Paul Staiti, Alumnae Foundation Professor of Fine Arts, Mount Holyoke College