I’m sorry, but I have to disagree. Museums should encourage public engagement with art, not ‘educate’ those members of the public who feel they know nothing about it.

Whenever I tell someone that I am an Art Historian I am too often met with the response, “I don’t know much about art” or “I don’t understand it”, and I think Art History as a discipline has trapped itself in a corner by seeking to give the impression that art is something to be ‘understood’ in the first place.

To state that it is proper and right for an institution to reorder its collection so that it is chronological, harks back to a redundant view of art history and the canon, which flourished 40 years ago. The times are moving forward, and institutions need to keep up. It’s nothing to do with hipsters or curators attempting to seem more radical in their thinking. It is about time we stop teaching the public to gaze in awe at Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo as Renaissance masters and encourage them to look at how they’ve shaped the work that dominates the contemporary art market. And what better way to read these links than by juxtaposing works created hundreds of years apart?

Also many great points about the con that modern art really is. What they are peddling is not art per se, but meta art. Like Duchamp’s toilet, it’s not about the object itself, but the reaction. Funny now how the only reaction they are looking to produce is the wallet opening.

BTW did you know that Jeff Koons only collects old masters in his house, and is having Peter Pennoyer, president of the Institute of CLASSICAL Architecture and Art renovate said house? I’m not sure whether to be sickened by his apparent hypocrisy or to applaud his machiavellian brilliance. The man has gotten rich peddling kitsch!