ABSTRACT
This essay is a meditation or reflection (the use of such words is inescapably part of that long tradition) upon the broad architectonic parameters, distinctive features, or systemic structures underlying the historical formation of art history and museology. In particular, it is an ‘attempt to articulate what characterizes the storied space of museology in a manner which may help shed light on what may have been at stake in the origins of art history, itself a facet of a broader discursive field that might possibly be termed “museography”’. (…)
The evolution of the modern nation-state was enabled by the cumulative formation of a series of cultural institutions which pragmatically allowed national mythologies, and the very myth of the nation-state as such, to be vividly imagined and effectively embodied. As an imaginary entity, the modern nation-state depended for its existence and maintenance on an apparatus of powerful (and, beginning in the eighteenth century, increasingly ubiquitous) cultural fictions, principal amongst which were the novel and the museum. The origins of the professional discipline of art history, it will be argued here, cannot be understood outside of these complementary developments.
