Description
Book SynopsisIn
Art of Memories, Vincent Antonin Lépinay documents the Hermitage’s curatorial practices in an innovative consideration of the museum as a cultural laboratory. Lépinay analyzes the tensions between the museum as a space of exploration of the collections and as a culture heavily invested in self-protection from the outside world.
Trade ReviewLépinay's ethnographic knowledge of how the staff of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum tends its collections supports a brilliant, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the way curators maintain the meaning and historical importance of art works. Must reading if you want to understand the social processes that shape our experience of art. -- Howard S. Becker, author of
Art WorldsIn this beautifully written, superbly researched, and theoretically rich book, Lépinay changes the way you will see museums in general and the Hermitage in particular. His account of the worlds of the museum—knit together through objects, people, and documents—illumines the set of complex trajectories and careers that characterize the museum. -- Geoffrey C. Bowker, Donald Bren Professor in Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine
This multiperspectival study—directing its analytic arsenal at the sociological, anthropological, and historical components of the Hermitage—is admirable in its refreshing examination of a museum’s infrastructure.
Art of Memories is full of wit and intellectual surprises. -- Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, author of
The Hand of the Engraver: Albert Flocon Meets Gaston BachelardAs he did so brilliantly for the back office of a bank in
Codes of Finance, here Vincent Lépinay goes behind the galleries of one of the world’s greatest museums to discover its infrastructures of knowledge. He shows how, across the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras and with various technologies of memory, the Hermitage collected and protected persons and things, curators and collections. In
Art of Memories, the museum is a place of exploration, a space of science, and a cultural laboratory. -- David Stark, author of
The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic LifeSheds light on the little-known history of the museum and opens the door to the reader to reveal the organizational structure of the museum as a cultural laboratory. * International Journal of Russian Studies *
Theoretically rich and succinctly written,
Art of Memories will be of interest to scholars of media studies, social theory, museum studies, and material culture. * Choice *
In seeing the museum as a laboratory, as a box, or as an infrastructure,
Art of Memories opens avenues to explore and it will be interesting to see how they will be taken up by the specialists and professionals of heritage work. * Books and Ideas *
[A] bold and original study. * Russian Review *
Table of ContentsPreface: Experimenting with the Hermitage
Introduction: The Hermitage, a Cultural Laboratory
1. Moving Objects
Interlude 1: Art History and the Hermitage Before World War II
2. Documenting the Museum
3. Art History from the Collections Up
Interlude 2: Mobility at the Hermitage
4. The Nostalgic Modesty of Hermitage Restorers
5. Guides: Taking Science Down the Galleries
6. Spaces and Surprises: Technologies of Vision for a Long Winter
Conclusion: Secreting Memories
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
