Aesthetic Experience in Constructivist Museums

by E. Louis Lankford

Psychical Distance is dead, and Significant Form is in hiding. Not that many people care about such arcane aesthetic concepts anymore. This is an era of constructivist meaning-making, dynamic human engagement, and in-your-face social relevance. For American art museums it is a vertiginous period of conflicting goals and identity crises. As interpreters of culture, art museums have had to face tidal waves of revisionist history, postmodern narratives, political correctness, and critical and contextual zealots. As authentic-object oriented institutions, art museums must struggle to remain viable in a techno-culture where virtual worlds proliferate and the veracity of reproduction technology has connoisseurs doing double-takes. As exhibition-oriented institutions, art museums compete with the entertainment industry’s special effects teams who continue to up the ante in order to capture a jaded public’s attention. As educational institutions, art museums puzzle over how to provide active learning opportunities in an essentially passive hands-off environment. The term “paradigm shift” has been leveraged so often in attempts to explain the state of art museums that the phrase has become passé.