Abstract

Art

Gottlob Frege, the father of modern logic, once proposed that a word has meaning only in the context of a sentence. It is reckless, perhaps, to press as an analogy to this deep thought that a work of art has meaning only in the context of an exhibition. Everyone will allow that the circumstances of display often vest a work with qualities it does not possess in its own right: when a museum exhibits a painting in a room by itself, with velvet barrier and guards, something is being said about rarity, importance and value that the painting scarcely could say about itself. According to the author of this article, each critical or art-historical article implies an exhibition in what art historian Andre Malraux has termed the imaginary museum. To understand a painting, then, is to know what other works it would go with to form a coherent show.