Article
Impossible appraisals: art, anthropology, and the limits of evaluating museum collections in the mid-twentieth century United States
Museum Review
(2018)
Abstract
In 1958, art historian Creighton Gilbert proposed an audacious system to rank art museums in the United States. The system compared museum collections during an era in which relativism was becoming a dominant force in the social sciences, eschewing the direct comparison or ranking of differing cultural production. This article explores how and why such a system for ranking museums failed. At the same time, however, museum professionals nevertheless maintained their own, internal and less formalized systems for comparing museum collections. In California and beyond, museum professionals used pragmatic assessments to determine the value of museum collections when touring other institutions and orchestrating collections exchanges. In both art and anthropology museums, informal modes of assessing museum quality were maintained while public efforts to rank museums largely failed.
Keywords
- Museum history,
- art history,
- anthropology,
- collections,
- relativism
Disciplines
Publication Date
Summer September 11, 2018
Citation Information
Samuel J. Redman. "Impossible appraisals: art, anthropology, and the limits of evaluating museum collections in the mid-twentieth century United States" Museum Review Vol. 3 Iss. 1 (2018) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/samuel_redman/8/