Publisher's Synopsis
"On the Museum's Ruins" presents Douglas Crimp's criticism of contemporary art, its institutions, and its politics alongside photographic works by the artist Louise Lawler to create a collaborative project that is itself an example of postmodern practice at its most provocative.;Taking the museum as the paradigmatic institution of artistic modernism, Crimp surveys its historical origins and current transformations, from the plans for the Berlin Museum in the 1820s to reinstallations of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in the 1980s. But it is the breakup of this modernist paradigm that is the central subject of "On the Museum's Ruins". The new paradigm of postmodernism is elaborated through analyses of art practices broadly conceived, not only the practices of artists - Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Serra, Sherrie levine, and Robert Mapplethorpe - but those of critics and curators, of international exhibitions such as Documenta and "Zeitgeist", of new or refurbished museums such as the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.
