ABSTRACT
Some art is site-specific art; this just means that the work was designed to exist in a particular place and no other. To move a site-specific artwork, then, is to significantly alter it, perhaps even to destroy it. Many of the most iconic paintings of the Italian quattrocento were likewise painted to adorn particular spaces, especially in particular chapels. Thus, Piero’s Resurrection fresco would lose much of its effect if displayed on a wall of the Guggenheim rather than on the interior wall facing the entrance to the Palazzo della Residenza in Sansepolcro. Among art-historians, museum skepticism dates back to the late seventeenth century, with the advent of mass exhibitions in museum settings. Contextualism, then, seems to invite us to emphasize art’s site- specificity, thereby discounting the ideal of disinterested appreciation of works as self-contained autonomous entities.
