Preserving the unpreservable: docile and unruly objects at MoMA

Abstract

The aim of this article is to theorize how materials can play an active, constitutive, and causally effective role in the production and sustenance of cultural forms and meanings. It does so through an empirical exploration of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA). The article describes the museum as an "objectification machine" that endeavors to transform and to stabilize artworks as meaningful "objects" that can be exhibited, classified, and circulated. The article explains how the extent to which the museum succeeds in this process of stabilization ultimately depends on the material properties of artworks and, more specially, on whether these behave as "docile" or "unruly" objects. Drawing on different empirical examples, the article explores how docile and unruly objects shape organizational dynamics within the museum and, through them, the wider processes of institutional and cultural reproduction. The article uses this empirical example to highlight the importance of developing a new "material sensibility" that restores heuristic dignity to the material within cultural sociology.Keywords Museums . Materiality . Docile objects . Unruly objects . Cultural sociology Although still incipient and somewhat dispersed, it is nonetheless possible to detect the contours of a novel "sensibility" within cultural sociology that calls for the need to incorporate the material into the study of cultural forms, processes and meanings. This "material sensibility," as one might call it, has slowly emerged over the last years driven by a more or less heterogeneous collection of authors who, despite their methodological and theoretical differences, share the conviction that materials have been unduly neglected in the sociological study of culture. As Chandra Mukerji has put it (1997, p. 36), there is a growing need "to approach material culture without reducing objects to instantiations of discourse or realizations of cognitive representations," and to avoid "the disappearance of the material world behind language." In a similar vein, Harvey Theor Soc (2014) 43:617-645

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