Resumen de The politics of display or the display of politics?
Part of a special section on the problematics of collecting and display. A discussion of how changing physical environments and historical conditions prompt different readings of an artwork. The dramatic shifts in the reading of Adolph Menzel's work provide a good example of how the visual narrative of displays can produce multiple meanings. In Menzel's case, the reciprocal relationships between past and present and between art and audience are intricately intertwined with issues of nationalism and the emergence of modernism in the Second German Empire. The writer examines the often dramatic turning points, revisions, and reversals in the reading of Menzel's work and his place in the history of German art, arguing that they could not have occurred without the staging of his works in public displays.
