| Summary: | This dissertation proceeds from the premise that the art museum has a singularly
important responsibility to carry out in a democratic society. I argue that the museum's
task is "to make art public," that is, to move art—and the interpretive apparatus that
support and maintain it—from the relatively private spheres of the artist's studio and the
academy into the public realm. In a post modern milieu, where art consists just as much
of its interpretability as it does in the physicality of the object, the museum is faced with
the even more difficult task of making the art object as the range, depth, and breadth of
its interpretive repertoires available to the public. I suggest that the museum can take up
this public responsibility by creating self-consciously critical spaces of interpretation for
the public. In order to create these spaces, the museum must embark upon a critique of
the discursive coordinates that have privileged a pedagogy of display and that have
installed schooling as the primary interface between art and the public. In so doing the
museum can begin to articulate the spaces between its own interpretive authority and the
equally undeniable autonomy of the public to make whatever meaning they will in the
face of a pedagogy of display. I propose that it is from the spaces in between notions of
authorial truth and excessive relativism that the museum can begin to pay heed to the
kinds of interpretive repertoires that are currently embedded in its practices and from
there begin to develop critically engaged sites of interpretation for the public. I put
forward the concepts of "being-singular-plural" and "co-appearance" as productive ways
to re-imagine how critically engaged forms of interpretation in the art museum can work
intentionally and productively from the spaces between the poles of authority and
autonomy. === Education, Faculty of === Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of === Graduate
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