Mrs. Rockefeller's Exquisite Corpse
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2109244 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Courtney Bender (Columbia University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 768-797 |
| Publication date | 2021-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Comparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0010417521000244 |
| OpenAlex | W3208092040 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
The 'exquisite corpse' in this title refers to a gift book presented to Mrs. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in December 1931, which contains signed notes from Rockefeller's domestic employees, friends, ministers, art dealers, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) employees, and also a signed painting by Diego Rivera. The book's construction highlights the intersecting social networks and associations among a variety of religious, artistic, philanthropic, and domestic organizations and individuals that are more typically investigated as distinct or non-connecting. As such, the book invites an alternate reading of influences shaping MoMA's earliest years. This interpretation takes inspiration from the surrealist games and conceits of ethnographic and artistic surrealism-an approach that is generatively suggested by the Tribute Book's construction. Read in this way, I take the gift book to open up a range of associations that make possible modes of interpretation through which to consider the secular and the modern religious. I use the book's intertextual qualities as an entry point into a new consideration of the presence and effects of liberal-protestant spiritual aesthetics in MOMA's earliest years. I argue that such spiritual aesthetics shaped the secular museum's curation, display, and interpretation of political artists including Rivera and European surrealists
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Interpretation (philosophy) · Painting · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Reading (process) · Sociology · Tribute · Variety (cybernetics) · Visual arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Visual Culture and Art Theory
The cultural biography of things
The Social Life of Things
The Great American Thing
The Historical Genesis of A Pure Aesthetic
The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic
Numinous Experiences With Museum Objects
A Progressive View on Religion and Modern Art
Crafting Aura
Critical for Whom? Genealogy and the Limits of History
Making Trouble
The Great American Thing
On Personhood
We Have Never Been Modern
On Semiotic Ideology
Museum space and the experience of the sacred
Fantasies of Sovereignty
American Art Museums
On Ethnographic Surrealism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |