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Valéry Proust Museum

  • Theodor W. Adorno (author)
Chapter of: Extraterritorialities in Occupied Worlds(pp. 447–458)

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TitleValéry Proust Museum
ContributorTheodor W. Adorno (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0131.1.21
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/extraterritorialities-in-occupied-worlds/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightAdorno, Theodor W.
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2016-02-16
Long abstractThe Ger-man word, museal (“museum-like”), has unpleasant overtones. It describes ob-jects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect, than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like family sepulchers of works of art. They testify to the neutralization of culture. Art treasures are hoarded in them, and their market value leaves no room for pleasure of looking at them. Nevertheless, that pleasure is dependent on the existence of museums. Anyone who does not have his own collection (and the great private collections are becoming rare) can, for the most part, become familiar with painting and sculpture only in museums. When dis-content with museums is strong enough to provoke the attempt to exhibit paintings in their original surroundings or in ones similar, in baroque or rococo castles, for instance, the result is even more distressing than when the works are wrenched from their original surroundings, and then brought together. Sensibility wrecks even more havoc with art than does the hodge-podge of collections. With music, the situation is analogous. The programs of large concert societies, generally retrospective in orientation, have continu-ally more in common with museums, while Mozart performed by candle-light is degraded to a costume piece. In efforts to retrieve music from remote-ness of the performance and to put it to immediate context of life there is not only something ineffectual but also a tinge of industriously regressive spite. When some well-intentioned persons advised Mahler to darken the hall during the concert for the sake of the mood, the composer rightly replied that a performance at which one didn’t forget about the surroundings was worthless. Such problems reveal something about the fatal situation of what is called “the cultural tradition.” Once tradition is no longer animated by a comprehensive substantial force, but has to be conjured up by means of cita-tions, because “It’s important to have tradition,” then whatever happens to be left of it is dissolved into a means to an end. An exhibition of applied art only makes a mockery of what it pretends to conserve. Anyone who thinks that art can be reproduced in its original form through an act of will is trapped in hopeless romanticism. Modernizing the past does it much violence and lit-tle good. But, to renounce radically the possibility of experiencing the tradi-tion would be to capitulate to barbarism out of devotion to culture. That the world is out of joint is shown everywhere, in the fact that however a problem is solved, the solution is false.
Page rangepp. 447–458
Print length12 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)