Two New Books Explore Museums and Visual Culture

Alessandro Demma's 'Il museo come spazio critico' (Postmedia Books, 2018) traces the museum's evolution from its birth on August 30, 1792, alongside the guillotine, through its bourgeois and republican origins, Napoleonic universalism, and civic turn in Berlin, London, Washington, and Newark. The book highlights the Beaubourg and Guggenheim Bilbao as key milestones and argues that marketing can play a beneficial, even salvific, role by helping museums understand and engage their audiences toward greater relationality and experientiality. Meanwhile, W.J.T. Mitchell's 'Scienza delle immagini' (Johan and Levi, 2018) collects essays from 2015 that revisit his foundational concepts—pictorial turn, image/picture, metapicture, biopicture—and apply them to the biopolitical role of images. Mitchell's work, rooted in his 1978 study of William Blake, gave rise to visual studies, a discipline that distinguishes the 'visual' from the 'visuale,' as Didi-Huberman explained: the visuale is the excess of the visivo. The book is stimulating but only partially convincing.