As sympathetic as I am to much of what Lynne Munson says about politics and the new museology, she is dead wrong about Harvard. A quick look at John Updike's review of our Dürer exhibition in the current issue of the New York Review of Books proves my point. The exhibition and its accompanying catalog is the work of one of our graduate students who came to Harvard especially to pursue an object-based study of art history and to work with our art museums. The same is true of another graduate student who began working with us as an undergraduate and who is preparing an exhibition and catalog on the photography of Mel Bochner to open next year. All in all, we have five Harvard graduate students working as interns in our museums and have organized numerous exhibitions with students. In addition, our curators and conservators teach and are dedicated to connoisseurship, among other forms of art historical inquiry.
-- James Cuno
director, Harvard University Art Museums and
professor, history of art and architecture
Shares