Art Matters by Robert Mohan
Any Princeton student will be familiar with the experience of arriving in a seminar room—especially in East Pyne or McCosh Hall—and seeing the fragmentary writing from a previous professor strewn across boards in white chalk. The scribblings index the goings-on of the room just before the student entered.
On one wall, a name and date. On another, a handful of terms translated from Latin. We cannot re-create completely the experience of the previous seminar from these mere scratchings, but we observe some signs of life nonetheless. We are compelled, I think, to interpret this writing, to understand who left these fragments behind and why—it is human nature. I’ve always seen the Art Museum as a sort of inscribed seminar room: its portraits once hung above mantels, its ewers poured out libations, its jars held preserves, and its icons were proudly paraded through communities. Like the professor’s written fragments, these objects once made sense to someone, although we now catch little more than an oblique view of them. Like the student arriving for the next class, we, as art historians, find ways to make sense of these storied objects by writing didactics, devising categories, and constructing chronologies to contain them. Such strategies form the scaffolding of the discipline. My central academic interest over the last four years has been in pulling back the curtains of this field. I engage art historical methodologies while working against them, questioning the visibility afforded by the museum and the capacity of curation to account for art. These kinds of interventions are central to the history of collecting.
It was FRS 121, “Inside the Princeton University Art Museum,” that sparked my fascination with art history—particularly the history of collecting—and that interest has been sustained by a wide range of professors ever since. I’ve found that the Department of Art & Archaeology is invested not only in the study of how art “moves us” but also in how it “moves.” Perhaps nowhere else could I have taken dedicated courses on the market histories of African, Asian, and ancient American art, and certainly nowhere else could I have witnessed a collection being rehomed in real time.
Most art historians focusing on the history of collecting experience some kind of “rupture” in their education: an illuminating conversation with a curator, a radicalizing encounter with religious images during fieldwork. Mine was watching the new Art Museum be built from the ground up. Perhaps counterintuitively, the Museum’s closure from 2022 to 2026 constituted a thrilling time to be an art history major.
It included unique opportunities to work through real curatorial and logistical problems, many of which were shared with students as case studies in curator-led seminars. How could we balance the art historical significance of African objects with their provenance narratives? Was there a “correct” way to display sacred sculpture to suggest a monastic context? As a freshman, these were the questions I wrestled with as I walked the perimeter of the construction site daily, peering through gaps in the chain-link fence to get a better view inside. By the time the Art Museum opened in the fall of my senior year, our class felt like we had grown up alongside it. When I ran into a friend from FRS 121 at the 24-hour opening, we both noted the surreal aspect of walking through a structure for which we had seen so many renderings. It was as though we were seeing one chosen outcome from hundreds of potential ones, a curious tension between resolution and continuing possibility.
In the interim, I felt I had made some headway in pulling back the curtains of the modern museum. I worked for museums in domestic and international contexts but also for the dealers from whom they acquired. These experiences expanded my understanding of the industry and revealed a more complex, fraught structure than I had realized. I discovered an ever-expanding network of histories, priorities, and people. How can art matter in such fundamentally different ways to different people? How can a religious icon matter to its community of origin for its divine incarnation, yet to a curator for its exemplary representation of Pala dynasty sculpture? Which position are we closer to as visitors in the museum? In reflecting upon why art matters to me, I rediscover a tension already present in my professors’ scribbled-over chalkboards. When we walk into the classroom, at least, it is evident that the leftover material on the walls was not written for us. In attempting to decode it, then, we stake our right to this knowledge.
Art matters to me precisely because I am uncertain of whether I am myself entitled to understand its true power. I enter the museum like one who fears trespassing on a sacred space, enjoying my access to its treasures while remaining apprehensive of their presence here. I am still a perplexed student in the next seminar, reading words on the walls but perhaps misunderstanding them; seeing the forms but not necessarily the art.
