Leseprobe

158 of muses). 10 Interestingly, it was precisely the disagreements about wall labels that sparked the debate. There were voices such as Erich Steingräber’s—then director of Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg—who at the annual conference of the Association of German Museums 1974 called wall label a ‘destruction of art.’ 11 However, such positions were primarily directed at the interpretive object explanations, and did not intend to ques- tion the validity of the bare label. Beyond the polar opposition of information and expla- nation versus aesthetic experience, the question of how a museum understands its ped- agogical duty is still subject to negotiation. The worry that the parergon might override the ergon is still present among those concerned even with object labels. 10  See the volume Spickernagel and Walbe (eds.), Das Museum: Lernort contra Musentempel , 1976. 11 Quoted in Steen, ‘Ausstellung und Text,’ 1995, pp. 46–62, especially p. 47.  12 Grigely, Exhibition Pros- thetics , 2010, p. 7: ‘I use the critical term “exhibition prosthetics” to describe an array of these conven- tions, particularly (but not exclusively) in relation to exhibition practices. Perhaps out of habit, we seem decidedly inured to the experience of conventions like these. They are a part of the machinery of exhib- iting—we read titles, labels, and catalogues because their authority establishes for the artwork a sense of place. In this respect, moving closer to the artwork involves moving away from the artwork—to look closer at fringes and margins and representations, and ask what seems to me a very fundamental ques- tion: to what extent are these various exhibition conventions actually part of the art—and not merely Figure 1: Isaac Robert and George Cruikshank, A Shilling Well Laid Out , 1821, hand-coloured etching and aquatint, 15×23.6 cm.