BlogBack: The Clark on the Barnes

Please let us reassure you there was no intention to bar the Barnes, devalue the special nature of their collection, or even not to talk about them. Institutional relationships between the Clark and the Barnes are excellent. Moreover, papers at our symposium which are "synthetic" like Dario Gamboni's or Anne Higonnet's, will no doubt discuss the Barnes. And the ample time for discussion will allow the Barnes to emerge as a talking point if that is where conversation takes us.

Other collection museums, like the Menil, the Cognacq-Jay, the Jacquemart-André, etc., etc., could also have been discussed, and probably will be, but organizers of such events must always make choices. I should point out that our symposium, entitled as it is, "Private Realm and Public Space: The Collector's Museum in the Twenty-first Century," focuses on those collections that have become full public museums. One of the distinctions the Barnes always likes to make about itself is that it is an institution dedicated to education and appreciation of art, and not, in a strict sense, a museum. They scrupulously avoid using the word "museum" in all their literature.