The Natural Order of Things @ Jumex Museum

"The art museum is a complex structure that has been evolving for centuries, starting with the emergence of the kunstkammer and wunderkammer in the 16th century; encyclopedic collections of diverse objects that attempted to purvey a vision of the world. [...] The ontological shift brought about by the creation of the Musée du Louvre in Paris from the royal collections –one that marked the shift from the king’s picture gallery to the peoples’ museum—as well as the epistemological ruptures of the Enlightenment, such as the development of the exact sciences and taxonomic systems, oriented museum practices towards the public sphere and conceived of a social function for museums. [...] During the twentieth century the museum as a structure of knowledge, as well as its classificatory strategies, became the subject of interest for many artists who appropriated the idea of the museum. [...] This exhibition that presents itself as the idea of a museum, thus a fiction, organized in taxonomic divisions—orders—that simultaneously support but also interrogate this regime of classification, locates itself within a wide universe of referential coordinates that transcend Broodthaers’ gesture. Nevertheless, it also operates within the conceptual register articulated by Broodthaers, particularly in what regards the tensions between art and the market. In tracing an “evolutionary line” between homo faber and homo economicus, the exhibition highlights the forces that exert an influence on the museum’s modes of representation today." [source]