From the museum as a prison of Images to the triumph of the city as a total work of art

Abstract

The text initially presents Paul Valéry’s critique of museums, noted in his 1923 article “Le problème des musées”, which started from a presupposition that Benjamin later theorized within the concept of “aura”. Marcel Mauss and Bataille are introduced from the point of view of their importance to think the “ethnological turn” of our vision of art and museum, which shook the aesthetic Eurocentric tradition. With Foucault the museum is thought of as one of the figures assumed by the omnipresence of heterotopias in modernity. Recovering Adorno’s reflection on museums, inspired by Valéry and Proust, the text retrieves his thesis that the arts have become inscriptions of historical suffering. The genesis of museums in the nineteenth century is resumed as part of an ontotipological ideology, of creation of the nation, of the “own” as opposed to the “other”. Then it remembers the conception of Benjamin for whom the tradition was exploded by the technical reproduction and was sucked by the cinematographic images. It concludes with the theory of Vilém Flusser of the end of the museums and the triumph of the city as total work of art, Gesamtkunstwerk. It is noted that the aestheticization of modern society can either assume a fascist character or an emancipatory character. Everything depends on the ludic-critical vision of art to be able to overcome the forces of censorship that want its annihilation and the imposition of a totalitarian thought.