For your consideration: "Acceptance in the Museum" (Chapter 4,8, &9 of Understanding the Art Museum)

Barbra A. Beall-Fofana, understanding the Art museum, please read chapter 4 "How do museums know what they know?"  Chapter 9, ongoing challenges.

Answer the following "for your consideration" Chapter 4
What is provenance and why is it such an important issue in the art world?  The universal Leonardo project, launched in 2005, focuses on the techniques and process used by Leonardo da Vinci rather than claiming to determine attribution.  Why do you think this shift has taken place?

Provenance- "Refers to the records related to an artwork that document its ownership, ideally beginning with its creation date.  Yet, gaps often exist because many artworks do not have a consistent, unbroken history of ownership.  The earlier an artwork was created, the more likely it is to have an incomplete provenance.  As you can imagine, such is often the case for art found by archaeological excavation.  The original owners of these objects are often unknown; the provenance thus begins with the date of discovery.

Provenance data includes verification of the known artist or workshop, the history of ownership or documentation from archaeological excavations, any records of sale, exhibition history, and citations in exhibition catalogues or art historical writings about the work.  All this information is made available for any artwork that legitimately comes up for sale or donation."  (Page 20)

**********

During WWII, as Jewish homes were ransacked and stripped of all valuables, family legacies and heirlooms were lost to those families that owned them.  Artifacts have resurfaced throughout the years either by black-market sales of such stolen merchandise and/or recovered from archeological means.  The introduction of Provenance (or record keeping of the past, present, and furture) have allowed for such artifacts to be returned to their rightful owners, as well as keep their monetary values and presence throughout the decades.

Photo taken by the Nazis during World War II shows a room

filled with pieces stolen throughout the war.

**********

http://www.universalleonardo.org/news.php
"Universal Leonardo: Leonardo da Vinci Online was nominated for inclusion
in the EDSITEment project in response to an open call for nominations
posted on their website and on several humanities listservs. The site was
then reviewed by a Peer Review panel composed of teachers and leaders in
education and non-profit organizations. Panelists determined that Universal Leonardo
site met the EDSITEment criteria for intellectual quality, content,
design, and most importantly, classroom impact.

Research
Research Leonardo’s life and works by consulting the resources in this section.
Despite Leonardo’s incredible fame and notoriety, the relatively extensive documentation of his life leaves his personality surprisingly elusive. The vast body of written material produced by the artist contains surprisingly few references to his daily existence or the events of his life, while contemporary accounts or testaments by others offer only occasional glimpses of the person.
The Life & Times chronology of Leonardo is based exclusively on documentary evidence gleaned from a wide variety of sources, and serves to illustrate what is known about the life of Leonardo in relation to the political and cultural events of his time.
The In-depths, Links and Bibliography pages provide a guide for further exploration for beginners."

**********

In my opinion, Leonardo had such a distinctive quality and or characteristics with his works, it isn't hard to attribute work to him.  Leonardo's work has a fine line between artistic nature versus scientific discovery.  It seems that this site was created to educate and further explore works and details that are absolute.

***********

"For your consideration" Chapter 9
Review the information presented in Chapter 8 on Marcel Duchamp's work called Fountain (see figure 12).  If you had been on the committee that decided what could and could not be exhibited at the American Society of Independent Artist, would you have allowed this work to be in the show?  Why or why not?  What have your criteria for acceptance or rejection?

Marcel Duchamp, "Fountain", 1887-1968, 1917, replica 1964, 

Porcelain, Unconfirmed: 360 X 480 X 610 mm

"Museums expose you to works you might otherwise never see.  But many artworks were created for a specific place, and removing them from their original setting challenges their physical and cultural context.  It may dramatically alter not only your experience of them but also their intended meaning.  Many works were also made to serve a particular purpose-whether cultural, civic, religious, or personal.  Therefore, when you look at art in a museum, consider where it would have been located originally and how it might have functioned within society or culture."  (Page 45)

"Lets push the issue of the importance of an object's physical context a little further.  What if placing a work within an art museum didn't take away from its meaning?  Instead, what if doing so bestowed status and enhanced its importance and significance?  Artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) considered just such ideas when he created his sculpture called Fountain (Fig. 13) in 1917."  (Page 47)

***********

Duchamp was the first of many to question the criteria of what was called and accepted as art.  Is it something polished and framed, or could it be "readymade" objects created from an assembly line and then chosen?  After Duchamp was rejected with his urinal submission, he resigned from the board and is thought to have written an article stating that "Mr. Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral.  It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' shop windows.  Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance.  He CHOSE it.  He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view-created a new thought for that object." (The Richard Mutt Case', The Blind Man, New York, no. 2, May 1917, p. 5.)  Although his need to bend the rules and play in the gray areas has lead us to a conceptual way of thinking, I believe that if I were living during that time, I may have been inclined to agree with the committee.  If you let just anything in, then how can an artist or individual acquire the recognition as being a great or successful artist?  How might one jury a urinal that was bought, to an oil on canvas that had to be constructed with many hours of work?  If I were to be placed on a committee now,  I might not think that way after all we have seen in the last two decades.  I guess I wouldn't know until I heard the artist's claim behind the thought or meaning of their piece.