M.Tech. (Fine Art) / The research investigates the similarities and differences between the display of selected, mass-produced objects in museums, with special reference to the Victoria & Albert Museum and Melrose House Museum, and in three domestic spaces. A brief historical background to the activity of collecting mass-produced objects is explored in order to reveal the archival function of museum displays and domestic displays, each of which conserve and preserve objects. The public and private meanings attached to objects in different spaces is suggested, and the ability of the selected objects to reflect social issues beyond their function is addressed. Both museum displays and domestic displays provide the source for the altered objects and drawings which form the exhibition. In manipulating the ready-made, mass-produced objects possible new meanings and narratives are suggested.

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This thesis examines why and how art is collected and used by modern corporations. Primarily, the study is focused on Alcan Aluminium Ltd., but for purposes of comparison and illumination, substantial attention is paid to Martineau Walker, Loto-Quebec and the Banque Nationale du Canada, all Montreal-based companies that have collected art for at least twenty years. / An historical introduction outlining the relationship between the arts and business---from the Renaissance in Europe to its place of greatest expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; in the U.S.A. as well as in Canada---begins the discussion. An attempt is made to position the activities of modern corporate art collecting between two poles---that of the individual collector and that of the institutional art museum. / Motives for collecting include, among many, the search for distinction and the desire to create a perception in the community of humanitarian standards guiding the corporation. The ways in which corporate motives contribute to the creation of a positive external corporate art identity, and thus a productive business environment, are examined and developed, as are the principal objections of their chief public detractor, artist-writer Hans Haacke. / In three of the four corporations studied, original research on the behavioural and emotional reactions of employees to the corporate art surrounding them has allowed an in-depth analysis of the internal effects of art on employees. Foremost among these are feelings of pride, well-being and the enhancement of self-identity. / Finally, a brief discussion of the role of mediators is offered, in particular that of the corporate curator in the modern art world.

Over a period of two decades, Raymond D. Nasher, a Dallas-based real estate developer, and his late wife Patsy amassed a collection of significant modern sculptures. For years, pieces from the private collection--numbering over 300 as of 1990--were on display in various museums and civic institutions, and they were installed on a rotating basis at Northpark Center, a Dallas shopping mall developed by Nasher. Since the 1987 Dallas Museum of Art exhibition, the collection has been shown in several major international museums. This study documents the formative period of the collection, the Nashers' collecting and exhibiting philosophies, and four early exhibitions of the sculptures. It includes a chronology of the Nashers and major acquisitions of sculpture.

From Conclusion: For the sake of posterity and historical research, our need for secure origins and our appreciation of and pleasure in fine craftsmanship and art, it is important that any Art Collection, particularly an Historical one, be fully documented. All data pertaining to the pictures should be recorded from an artistic, historical and even scientific point of view and photographs should be taken of the pictures. An organized classification system, the correct registering and labeling of each picture and its accessioning and cataloguing as part of the contents of the Gallery and for visitors information, should be constantly 53 maintained and where necessary and in as many ways as possible, cross-references made so that the stored information be usable. To this end and with the growth and increasing importance being placed on Art Museums and Galleries in the community it would probably be of value to cross-reference with other similar institutions and in the respect and day and age, it is not unrealistic to propose that the King George VI Art Gallery consider a computer cataloguing system to facilitate research and complement a more simplified version for the use and guide of the general viewing public . The significance of a picture is not only its value as such, but also the information relating to it. The importance of the Historical Collection as Africana and works of art, expressive of the places, events, people and even attitudes, and as cultural and historic items, goes without saying. Without the Historical Collection of the King George VI Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth, the Eastern Cape community and South Africa too, would be the poorer. The pictures have their role to play .

By way of an analysis of the lino-cuts executed by Muafangejo, firstly elements and influences that are evident in terms associated with his works, will be traced, for example 'primitive' and 'traditional' elements. Secondly, the characteristics that are particular to this artist's work will be defined. It is believed that by using this avenue of approach, a clearer understanding of the artist's traditional world and possibly the stylistic placement of the artist can be attained. However, to rely only on historical and cultural influences to give a perspective of his work, will not be sufficient. It will only highlight a portion of the evidence needed to fully understand his work. (From the introduction).

Bibliography: leaves 156-167. The aim of this thesis is to show how in practice the National Socialists sacrificed ideological considerations to the material advantages that could be gained from the sale of "degenerate art". In practice the term "degenerate" was extended beyond modern art to include French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, specifically because they were highly saleable. This is evinced by the sales of "degenerate art" which were conducted by the Reichministerium für Volksklärung und Propaganda (RMVP). The record of the sales compiled by the propaganda ministry in the summer of 1941, provide conclusive evidence that the Reich government compromised its ideological position for financial gain. The sale of "degenerate art" conducted by order of the Reich at the Galerie Fischer auction in Lucerne in 1939, provides further evidence that the practice of confiscation was economically driven.

This thesis addresses the nineteenth-century art collection of Donald Alexander Smith, Lord Strathcona (1820--1914), in relation to intersecting questions of imperialism, colonial relations, and cultural status. Both the formation of the collection and its dispersal are linked to a dialectic of cultural hegemony and national identity in nineteenth-century Canada. Smith came penniless to Montreal from Scotland in 1838, became the wealthiest man in Canada by the end of the century, and is known as Lord Strathcona after being raised to the peerage by Queen Victoria in 1897. My discussion of the rise and fall of Strathcona's collection is informed by postcolonial theory and its critical re-reading of imperialism. While British imperialism was the ideology that governed Strathcona's activities, Anthony Giddens's structuration theory is introduced to account for how personal agency remains operative within this dominant ideology. / Strathcona formed a significant collection of European paintings and Asian art, which was, however, largely dispersed by the institution charged with its care, thus reducing its significance. Krzysztof Pomian's concept of collectors as select individuals who mediate symbolic cultural power through semiotic constructs provides an important methodological anchor for an analysis of the collector and his collection, as does Carol Duncan's work on the motivation to collect art and to structure cultural identity through control of museums. As well, the princely model of collecting reveals the humanist values operative throughout the centuries by comparison of Strathcona to the Medici in terms of the deployment of spectacle. / This thesis makes use of primary source materials to compare Strathcona's collection to several of his peers in order to place him in his cultural milieu during a time in Canadian history when Montreal was a British enclave in a French province. Analysis of fragmented primary source inventories, catalogues, personal letters, and records held by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Archives of Canada, identification of paintings documented in the Notman photographs of 1914--1915, and my tracing of the public portraits of Strathcona by Robert Harris still on view in Montreal institutions allowed me to create useful inventories that previously did not exist.

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The purpose of this thesis is to study and analyse collections of outsider art in two Swedish Medical History Museums, Medicinhistoriska museet in Uppsala and Mentalvårdsmuseet in Säter. The work explores how the history of the museums, how art collections were established, the outsider artist as well as how the two museums work the collections today. The empirical part of the study is based on the fieldwork that the author conducted at the Medicinhistoriska museet in Uppsala and Mentalvårdsmuseet in Säter during two separate days in the winter/spring of 2022. Both observations of the museum room were made, as well as interviews with the two curators in charge of the art collections. Attentive observations and systematic notes from constitute the basis for the description of the material and immaterial features of the museum. For the chapters on the historical and cultural context concerning outsider art, art brut, psychiatric care and how the hospitals became museums, literary sources were used.  The result of the study shows that outsider art made in a hospital is a very specific part of outsider art and art brut because of the very special conditions of an often locked psychiatric care unit. It implies that outsider art made in psychiatric care have not been seen as real art, not been viewed as interesting for the public. There has existed an authorised heritage discourse (“AHD”) in the hospitals and well as in the later museums which has led to the collections not been correctly taken care of, and research about the patients has not been made. Instead, the patients work has been stored incorrectly in attics, basements and in un-locked storage areas with only a few ”aesthetically pleasing” works showed in the museum.      Further, the study shows how the art collections in the two medical hospitals correctly used and worked with, can be a part of removing the stigma around mental disease and people living with it.  The conclusions to be drawn from this are that the complexity of the art collections of outsider art made in psychiatric care lie in the fact that mental illness, psychiatric hospitals, and outsider art have been under a stigma, as well as the fact that the patients’ stories being stories from the margin. This is a two-years master’s thesis in Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies.