Global Exhchange and Art's Symbolic Value:
". . [international] art exhibitions have taken on the meaning of recongnition and reconciliation. When the German nation put on the exhibition Documenta in Kassel in the late [post-war] 1940's, it demonstrated that it wished to acknowledge its readiness to participate once again in civilized discourse. . .in people's participation the gesture was acknowledged"
"After WWII, Austria and Japan sent exhibitions of reconciliation to America as a sign that the hostilities were over. When detente set in in the 1980's, there was no better sign of this reconciliation than the exchange of impressionist and postimpressionist paintings between the then Soviet Union and the United States."
"I think this is the bright side of something found deep in ancient human practices; namely, that the victors [in war] declare their power by taking the art of the defeated as trophies, which is a kind of cultural rape. To rob a society of its art is symbolically equivalent to violating its women. . .Agamemnon took the gold of Priam from Troy to Mycenae; in turn this booty was, in the last war, carried off by Russians from the defeated Germans. The Germans under Hitler and Goering did the same, as did Napolean, to whose wholesale confiscation of art we owe the museums of Europe: as temples for the display of artistic trophies from defeated nations. . ."
from "Art and the Discourse of Nations" by Arthur C. Danto
(Included in the collection of essays "Drawing Us In: how we experience visual art")
Posted by delpesco at March 22, 2004 11:39 AM