general conferenc e & 22 - ICOM Österreich

Hans Belting:
can you understand me? Well, ithink we have more of an acoustic crisis at the moment
than an intellectual one, but my question actually was, do we accept the concept of a universal
heritage and what does it mean? and i am sorry to say i did not understand what you
said from here, so maybe you can reframe it? not for me, but for the audience.
Susan Legêne:
Well, when the question really is that straight forward and asks whether one accepts this
idea of universal heritage, then Ithink it is aworking definition in adialogue.
it is not a kind of character of the collection we have in our museums because, in that sense,
i do not think it exists. it exists as a kind of dialogue structure.
Christoph Stölzl:
Youask about universal heritage and on the horizon there is akind of idea of common world
consciousness ofheritage. Isee no other definition than to move into the arts.
iremember when the royal academy put on the enormous exhibition africa: the art of a
continent ten years ago, throwing away all ethnological preciseness and just showing artefacts
as art. the public in London and Berlin was shocked and overwhelmed by the incredible
strength and emotional fire of the objects. I think, perhaps, it was not really scientific
and you risk neglecting all those diverse, precise stories about the cultic and performance
meaning of the objects, but you can understand as a european how beautiful, how wonderful,
how touching achinese object is or an african one.
Youdonot have to know exactly what people did with it five hundred years ago, just as an
african does not have to precisely understand the rites of the christian catholic mass to be
awestruck when he or she sees an altarpiece in Bruges or Brussels.
ithink art as common understanding is not so bad, maybe it is minimal but it is an open door
for the whole world, for people coming from completely different traditions to see a neighbourhood
because mankind has a feeling for the arts, for the aesthetic dimension and, on a
certain level, it is amoral dimension as well. iwould say this idea of the world art museum is
much more feasible than aworld historical ethnological common consciousness. You cannot
read all those books, learn everything, life is too short for that.
Jyotindra Jain:
iquite disagree with what you are saying because ithink we are then entering the question
of whether beauty is local or universal, and idonot think that this is really true. Beauty is not
some kind of universal.
of course, you can identify afew principles such as symmetry or workmanship, and using
those criteria one might say, “What excellent workmanship!” symmetry might appeal universally
but when you give me the example of african masks, i do not think that african masks
were appreciated in europe in the nineteenth century that much until they slowly began to
be understood from their original context. then a tradition of art historical writing began to
bring out the merit of african masks. it was only then that they began to be known and appreciated.
When masks were displayed in anthropological museums, the caption would only
talk about the religious context.
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