Museal tropes in popular film

Abstract

This text concentrates on the enactment of exhibitions, particularly, within the films of Batman, Dressed to Kill and 9 1 /2 Weeks. While central to the discourse of visual art, exhibitions must in fact be performed. An aesthetic experience, then, can be considered not only in terms of a static visual relationship between beholder and art, but also in its proprioceptive aspect of moving through space. The project of analysing museum enactment poses obvious challenges short of actually stalking people. So I have turned to examining the action of museum scenes from popular films. What I found was that the coding of the postural and kinaesthetic engagement of gallery visitors provides a rich source for mining some of the ways that aesthetic experience is stereotyped. Beholders shift their weight between feet, step back to get a different view, cup their chins with their hands, or walk through gallery spaces with the kind of indrawn awareness characterizing heightened visual engagement. But beyond these representations, I have discovered that films portray the gallery space as contexts for affective choreographies which exaggerate, or even exceed, aesthetic conventions altogether.The disciplinary aspects of museum enactment have been explored by several authors in recent museum criticism. Carol Duncan (1995), for example, has argued that museums are performed as civilizing rituals which constitute an art public, while Tony Bennett (1995) has elucidated, in the wake of Foucault, how the disciplinary architectures of museums operate on the minds of spectators as they view an exhibition and on their bodies as they themselves are viewed. We now know that aesthetic experience is administrated and contained through the behavioural protocols of the gallery space: speaking in hushed tones, not touching works of art, refraining from running. We are guided to contemplative conduct by the presence of museum personnel: museum guards who police apprehension, volunteer guides who exemplify 'the ideal viewer' , and from time to time curators who, heir to the class of connoisseurs, perform savoir faire through their physical manner and style. Yet, despite the efforts of museums to contain their public's aesthetic experience, individuals activate the museal according to their own tactical pleasures and purposes. What I want to argue here is that museums pose the

Some basic aspects of quantum phase transitions

“…[6]). The same disadvantage characterizes the results of other papers [23,89] because the exact solution [81] is not familiar to the authors [95,96].…”

“…If we use the exponent Θ ′ = (d − Θ), which has been already introduced in our analysis, the Eqs. ( 88), ( 95), (96), and (98) will change in an obvious way. For example, the k−dependence in the second term in the r.h.s.…”

The Simpsons did it: Exploring the film trope space and its large scale structure

“…For example in [ 17 ] action films tropes are discussed, including characters tropes (cop, cowboy), actions (chase, last minute rescue) and techniques (for example, camera shaking movement). More works have focused in other kind of tropes, such as the trope of the Zombies [ 18 ], scenes that take place in a museum [ 19 ], or even as specific as the Brazilian housemaid [ 20 ].…”