Word: artes
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Originally the precursor to the modern museum, cabinets of curiosities or wonder rooms displayed a hodge-podge of objects that drew from domains as diverse as natural history, geology, archaeology, ethnography, and fine art. The British Museum, which opened in 1759 and was one of the first public museums, was construed from the very beginning as a “universal museum” with a collection that included art, applied art, archaeology, and anthropology...
...museum evolved, however, divisions emerged between the fine art museum and the anthropology or archaeology museum. In the 19th century, the Golden Age of Museums, cultural objects were seen as belonging to two different categories: art objects, considered primarily for their aesthetic value and arranged chronologically to trace artistic developments, and artifacts, grouped by civilization and serving as generic representatives of a particular culture. Not surprisingly, the objects designated art tended to be Western, while those classified as artifacts tended to be from so-called “primitive” cultures such as Native American, sub-Saharan African...
Closer to home, the traditional dichotomy between art and artifacts is also slowly beginning to break down. In just a few months, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA) will unveil its new wing devoted to the Art of the Americas. The new wing, designed by Norman Foster, will contain over 50 new galleries spread over four floors. Visitors will begin on the ground floor with the Pre-Columbian era and work their way up until they get to the modernist masters like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline on the top floor, alongside African-American artist Jacob Lawrence...
This groundbreaking proposal to exhibit objects from the entire hemisphere, ranging from painting and photography to musical instruments and the decorative arts, points to the dissolving boundaries between the traditional categories of art and artifacts...
Here on campus, the traditional distinction between art and anthropology, embodied in the existence of the Harvard Art Museum, on the one hand, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology on the other, is also being obscured...