Art History and Museology: Points of Intersection and Points of Contact

Abstract

The article considers the relationship between art history and museology on the basis of how the concepts of museum object and artwork are related in the context of an art museum. An important role in this relationship is played by museum communication, which is constantly updated with the appearance of a new recipient. A concrete example of a scrupulous analysis of the acts of museum communication with a monument of ancient Greek art, Nikandre’s dedication ca. 650 BC., which was produced by Alice A.Donohue, clearly demonstrates the advantage of the open approach of museology for a better and deeper study of even very ancient artifacts in an art museum. Her conclusion that a description and an interpretation of a museum object are one and the same, and not the successive stages of its study, is particularly important. Both acts of scientific research are conditioned by a scholar’s mentality, formed by his milieu and time, education and reading (e. g. Winckelmann’s view of the history of Greek art), and are an expression of an artwork’s current identity. Clarification of the changing current identities of a museum item (artwork) allows us to consider it as an open system, regardless of when and why it was created. Studying the sequence of acts of museum communication can bring us closer to identifying its conceptual identity (idea) and actual one (embodiment). Ultimately, all these searches can become extremely fruitful for an art museum to perform its scientific, exhibition, and educational functions. Interdisciplinary interaction of museology as a theoretical discipline and art history, which often reveals an equally valuable subjective, individual, that is, in fact, a unique approach to the perception of a museum object as a work of art, is not only possible, but also necessary to better understand it.