ABSTRACT
‘Circa 1492’ is an exhibit with a double vision: the eye expanding to hold the world in one space: the eye averted, awry, attenuated, trying to see the uniqueness of each specific cultural tradition and production. The predominant perspective of ‘Circa 1492’ is to allow cultural heterogeneity at the individual level so long as the homogeneity of the notion of the human is left relatively uncomplicated within a universal esthetic realm. Holbein’s anamorphic skull - the painting is not included in ‘Circa 1492’ - emerges as the emblem of the death and alienation at the very heart of Discovery Pride. Circa 1992, the international or global art-show has become the prodigious exhibitionary mode of Western ‘national’ museums. The parallelism of the modem museum, in its internationalist mode, turns on an esthetic axis of ‘equal distance equal difference’, but the history of culture has been neither so equitable nor so ecumenical.
