When the USA Discovered Byzantium-A Tale of the Culural Other

8/9/2019 When the USA Discovered Byzantium-A Tale of the Culural Other

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When the U.S.A. discovered Byzantium:A Tale of the Cultural Other

Katerina Biliouri1

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the reception of Byzantine art in the United States. It aims to shed light onthe ways that Byzantine otherness has been perceived and formulated within different socio-

political frameworks. Specifically, it examines two moments in the history of understanding and presenting the Byzantine cultural other in the United States. The first moment goes back to thediscovery of Byzantium in the 1930s within the dominant theory of cultural internationalism. Thesecond is placed today in the current time of multiculturalism, through the study of threeByzantine art exhibitions organised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: “The Age ofSpirituality” in 1977, “The Glory of Byzantium” in 1997 and “Faith and Power” in 2004. The senseof exoticism ascribed to Byzantine art in these might vary, but Byzantium always remains theexotic other in the U.S.A.

KEYWORDS: Byzantine art reception, cultural internationalism, multiculturalism, MetropolitanMuseum of Art Byzantine exhibitions, “Age of Spirituality”, “Glory of Byzantium”, “Faith andPower”

Introduction

In an article published in the New Left Review, the philosopher and cultural critic, SlavojŽižek characterised the current much-debated issue of multiculturalism as the ideal formof global capitalism, an attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats eachlocal culture in the same way a colonizer treats colonized people; as “natives” whoseotherness and mores are to be carefully studied and “respected” (Žižek, 1997).

Bearing in mind this theoretical approach, the current article is an attempt to examinewhether cultural otherness is still viewed today as an exotic “native”, despite the present-day issues of globalisation and multiculturalism. Moreover, it aims to shed light on theways that this continuously ascribed exoticism is reshaped and redefined by the socio-political and economic reality of each time. Overall, it is influenced by the post-structuralist idea that self-perception plays a critical role in one’s interpretation of theother. In order to study all the above-mentioned the tale of a cultural other within aspecific society is unfolded. For the purposes of this research, Byzantine art serves asan excellent field to ponder such issues, as simultaneously it is and is not part of theWestern tradition.

This article does not cover the whole story of Byzantine art in the United States untiltoday. It examines two historical moments of Byzantine art’s presence in the UnitedStates: the first is upon the entrance of Byzantium’s artistic achievements when“America appeared on the market” (Weitzmann, 1947); the second is at the turn of the

1 Archaeologist-Museologist, MPhil University of Cambridge,

Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki, Greece, [email protected]

- International Scientific Electronic Journal, Issue 5, 2009 35 © Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean

mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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21st century through the presentation of three major Byzantine art exhibitions, organisedby the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1977 the Met’s first exhibition “TheAge of Spirituality” was dealing with Early Christian art. Twenty years later, in 1997 “TheGlory of Byzantium” was an exhibition devoted to the art of the Middle Byzantine periodand was the blockbuster show of the year. The third exhibition “Byzantium: Faith andPower (1261-1557)”, presenting Late Byzantine art, was organised in the spring of 2004

as a successor to the previous ones. Being organised by the same museum, theseexhibitions offer a robust example of the gradual shaping of otherness through theevolved practises applied by the same institution.

Byzantium was “discovered” by the United States in the 1930s, when the dominantsocio-political theory was that of cultural internationalism. Its study flourished during thepost World War II era of the widely discussed cultural imperialism. Today, and within thecontext of the presiding theory of multiculturalism, Byzantine art exhibitions areconsidered as some of the most successful and most visited exhibitions in the UnitedStates. Moreover, between the first and the following Met exhibitions, the introduction ofethnic marketing practises into museums also influenced issues of understanding anddisplaying otherness.

Discovering Byzantium

The development of research activities and private collections of Byzantine objects inAmerica, according to the influential art historian Kurt Weitzmann, must definitely beviewed against the European background of the 1930s. In Europe the growing interest inByzantine art had crystallised before the United States. The great international exhibitionin Paris in 1931, the first entirely devoted to this field, presented to a large public theartistic achievements of a culture against which a prejudice of monotony and sterility hadexisted since the days of the Italian Renaissance. The Louvre, the Cluny Museum inParis, the British Museum in London and the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin had

started establishing their own systematic collections. The Museo Sacro of the Vaticanand the Cabinet des Medailles in Paris already possessed several Byzantine objects.The awareness of private collectors on new trends in artistic taste and their attraction toluxurious small objects of Byzantine art, coupled with the conservative policy of mostmuseums, resulted to private collectors in the United States becoming the “chief rivals ofEuropean museums” (Weitzmann, 1947: 396). At the same time, the American School ofClassical Studies in Athens (ASCSA) legitimised Byzantium as a worthwhile period ofarchaeological investigation. Byzantium entered the ASCSA via modernism and itsavant-garde vibrancy and this “medievalist inclusionism” was evident throughout thewhole decade preceding World War II (Kourelis, 2007). Obviously, the new trend was toprove the ability of dealing with Byzantine art as soon as possible, either through itsacquisition or through excavations.

At the beginning of the 20th century the outstanding private collections formed the basisof the most important museum collections of Byzantine art in the United States. In 1917Pierport Morgan donated his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,in 1925 the Byzantine collection of Charles L. Freer was made accessible to the publicas part of the Smithsonian Institution and in 1931 Henry Walters bequeathed hiscollection to his native city of Baltimore, forming the Walters Art Gallery, currentlypossessing one of the richest collections of medieval art in the United States and havingsince been renamed as Walters Art Museum. Rare objects by collector Josef Brummer



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WHEN THE U.S.A. DISCOVERED BYZANTIUM: A TALE OF THE CULTURAL OTHER

are nowadays found in the Dumbarton Oaks collection in Washington and the Met inNew York. The Bliss collection, which is the basis of the Dumbarton Oaks collection,became a part of Harvard University in 1940 together with its Research Library.Moreover, Byzantine art was gradually placed in the centre of scholarly interest throughthe awareness of its contribution to the formation of the artistic language of the LatinWest. Universities and museums in the U.S.A organised exhibitions, such as the “Pagan

and Christian Art in the Latin West and the Byzantine East” by the Art Museum inWorcester in 1937, “Pagan and Christian Egypt” held by the Brooklyn Museum and“Early Christian and Byzantine Art” in Baltimore, both in 1947 (Weitzmann, 1947).

In 1925 the collections of George Grey Barnard and John D. Rockefeller Jr formed theinitial collection of the Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum devoted to the artand architecture of medieval Europe. The Cloisters, which opened its doors to the publicin its current building in 1938, did not include in its collection all phases of art, but wasrestricted to European medieval art, comprised of the Romanesque and Gothic periods(The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 1926). As the discovery of Byzantium had justbegun, European medieval art and the Middle Ages were linked solely to what wasunderstood as “western medieval art”. Byzantium was often given only a passing glance

as a medieval heir to the classical world which placed Western Christendom at thecentre.

Therefore, a reinterpretation of Byzantine art and its importance was needed. The UnitedStates, having their cultural roots in Europe, could not leave out of the picture one of thelongest living cultures, lasting for more than a millennium and represented by an art thatcombined classical heritage to essential values of Christianity (Weitzmann, 1947). In theyears that followed the collection was enriched with Byzantine art objects, forming thecurrent Metropolitan Museum of Art collection of medieval art, one of the richest in theworld, which encompasses objects of this long and complex period in all of its manyphases, from its pre-Christian antecedents in Western Europe through the earlyChristian, Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic periods.

The exotic other

It is evident that there was a sudden explosion of interest in Byzantine art in the 1930s. Itwas the unknown, beautiful, mysterious, distant, exotic and even orphaned culturalother; a stranger that appeared on the United States doorstep. During the interwarperiod, in an issue of the Parnassus journal, J. Shapley, while explaining why Americansshould be so interested in Byzantine art, wrote:

“Much has been made of the aloofness of Byzantine art. It is, however, illogical toconclude that this should arouse a corresponding aloofness in the observer, in us. Since

Byzantine art is foreign to our tradition we like its reserve. The stranger who appears onour doorstep is far more likely to enjoy a favourable reception if he is reticent, rather thanpushing or officious. Indeed, if he is an involuntary visitor, such as a wee, helplessfounding, without parents or protectors -and Byzantine art is almost that, largely arediscovery of our own time, severed from any existing political or national unit- he is aptto be taken in and fostered” (Shapley, 1931).

Byzantine art is compared to a helpless and orphaned visitor, in desperate need ofprotection. Such comparisons, seen in retrospective, could be characterised as quite



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amateur, due to the fact that Byzantine art was still something new and unknown in theUnited States. This “rediscovery” was presented as a hidden treasure from past times,despite the ongoing religious value it carried for Orthodox or other European countries.At the same time, the notable British art historian Talbot Rice, was trying to awake theinterest of art students in studying Greek icons, since, not only in Russia but also inGreece, Byzantine art survived as a living entity (Rice, 1933). Attempting another

comparison of this exotic other, Shapley continues:

“In matters of economics, we Americans have been accustomed to admire ourselves, forwe have felt that we were self-made. In matters of culture, we have been admiringothers, for we have felt that we must be eclectic. Byzantine art is precisely the candidatefor the second type of admiration: it is most decidedly exotic. Reserved, churchy, andceremonial it seems enticingly foreign. Like an odalisque, its tenure of the affectionsdepends on its capacity to remain perpetually different, inexhaustibly strange” (Shapley,1931).

Byzantium and cultural internationalism

Taking into consideration the above-mentioned quotes, it is obvious that the notion of theexotic and unprotected otherness acquired an “us” Americans and “the others”, possiblyEuropeans, socio-political distinction. Around the end of the Civil War and at the end ofthe 1930s “there was a special sense in which the idea [of culture] became widespread”(Susman, 1973). On that side of the Atlantic the very idea of showing Byzantine art inpublic exhibitions took root and was pursued with greater zeal than in any Europeancountry (Weitzmann, 1947). Such a climate of competitiveness with Europe is notunusual for that time. According to M. Vlahos, director of the Centre for the Study ofForeign Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, until 1945 Americans never consideredthemselves fraternally attached to Europe, nor did they talk about “the West” as apolitical and cultural entity. However, they still considered themselves part of the “Anglo-

Saxon race” (Vlahos, 1991). Competitiveness with Europe and consequent Americansuperiority can also be traced in the reception of Byzantine art, due to its ecclesiasticalcharacter:

“Most European writers are inclined to regard the ecclesiastical and formal qualities ofByzantine art as disadvantageous to it. These qualities have undoubtedly played a partin making it for a long time unpopular in Europe, but they have no such effect in America.America is neither ecclesiastical nor anti-ecclesiastical and, above all, not both at once,as countries often are” (Shapley, 1931).

By the late 1940s, the new concept of “the West” proved to be a highly useful politicaltool. The notion of the West and the definition of Western civilisation are long debated

issues, supporting either the notion of a universal “Central” civilisation or of a moregeographically based civilisation distinction. Byzantium, according to Lawrence J. Birken,was one heir to the classical world that was often marginalised by the other heir,Western Christendom. In the United States the traditional Western civilisation course stillinvents a false genealogy linking the Greeks, Romans, Renaissance, Enlightenment andthe United States (Birken, 1992).

At the years following Wilson’s presidency, the U.S. attempted to fashion an orderlyworld. Akira Iriye, a prominent scholar of American diplomatic history, explains that



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Wilsonianism had “an agenda of putting culture at the centre of international relations”(Iriye, 1994). After WWI this cultural internationalism, “came of age”, as the visions of therecent horrors of the war promoted cultural interconnections among nations. The idea ofcultural internationalism was never abandoned, despite the 1929 major economic crisis.After World War II Americans believed in their post-war mission of “containment”(Vlahos, 1991) and the defence of Europe, which was still in ruins. The economic,

military and hence political supremacy of the U.S. in the late 40s reflected the enormousdestruction sustained by all the great industrial nations in the war. On the other hand, inGreece between 1945 and 1965, Byzantium strangely disappeared from the pages ofHesperia, the Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Under thepolitical pressures of the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Greece, classicalGreece, the “cradle of democracy”, had to be asserted over Byzantium (Kourelis, 2007:434). Therefore, it is evident that different political, social and economic reasons wereeach time behind any discovery, interruption and resurface of interest in Byzantium.

Summing up, the United States discovered Byzantium during the difficult periods of thepost Word War I era, the Great Depression, World War II, as well as its aftermath. In ahistorical time characterised by progressive politics, middle-class assertiveness and

attempts –albeit often patronising- at urban reform and cultural enlightenment (Blau,1991), the reception of Byzantine art and its otherness could not remain uninfluenced.As the United States was gradually becoming a key player in the cultural scene andAmerican private collectors rivalled European museums, Americans showed a growinginterest in Byzantine art. Byzantium’s otherness in the United States was defined withinand by their evolvement from colonial to superpower status.

Byzantium and the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibitions

The second historical moment examined in this article is that of the aforementionedMetropolitan Museum of Art exhibitions. Byzantine art acquires a different sense of

otherness and exoticism, defined this time by the dominant socio-political theory ofmulticulturalism, an issue analysed after the presentation of the three exhibitions.

In 1977 the first exhibition entitled “The Age of Spirituality” explored the period ofByzantium’s history dating from the 4th to the 7th centuries. Nowadays, it is considered alandmark exhibition, as for the first time 450 objects, many of which had never beenshown before in the United States, were gathered from over 100 public and privatecollections, among them the British Museum, the Louvre and the Vatican. Therefore,according to the aspirations of Thomas Hoving, the museum’s director at that time, theobjects were brought together “in a new dynamic arrangement that will provide newinsights and new public appreciation for Late Antique and Early Christian art” (Hoving,1977). In the same Met’s Bulletin issue, Kurt Weitzmann, the creative force behind the

exhibition, wrote about the importance of this fascinating period. The transition from thedying classical to the rising -and finally triumphant- Christian culture was a complexprocess, in which the two cultures coexisted and competed with each other (Weitzmann,1977). The museum’s aim was exactly that; to unveil the friendly coexistence betweenpaganism and Christianity. Such a goal was not easy to achieve.

As suggested in a New York Times article concurrent to the exhibition, this complex andfascinating period was often taught in schools in terms of “a revolving door”. The articleexplained that “when Christianity came in through that [revolving] door, paganism went



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out” and also that “one of the more difficult transitions of history was dealt in ten minutes”(Russell, 1977).

The exhibition aimed to educate the public into a new way of thinking about that specificperiod and its objects. Therefore, according to Philippe de Montebello in the exhibition’scatalogue –and mentioned again in “The Glory of Byzantium” exhibition’s catalogue- it

was a “didactic exhibition of the highest quality; a combination of the relatively unfamiliarwith the intellectual revelation of an extraordinary era” (De Montebello, 1997).

Fig. 1. Screenshot from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online exploration of Byzantium,drawn from the Teacher Packet accompanying the exhibition “The Glory of Byzantium”

(http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/Byzantium/byzhome.html)

Twenty years later another exhibition brought Byzantine art closer to the United Statespublic. The exhibition entitled “The Glory of Byzantium” dealt with the Middle Byzantineperiod and its second “golden age” stretching from the end of the “iconoclastic period” in843 to the occupation of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 (fig. 1). Once again, awide range of objects with different provenance were assembled and displayed.

Specifically, through the gathering of objects from 119 collections and twenty-fourcountries, the curators aimed at presenting the breadth of the empire’s art and culture.Contrary to theories such as Samuel P. Huntington’s, suggesting that Byzantium and itsOrthodox Church belong not to the West but to the “Rest”, or else the various “others”that do not possess the special institutions and beliefs that constitute Western civilisation(Huntington, 1993), the museum aimed at presenting the cultural interaction andcoexistence of Byzantium with the Latin West and the Islamic East (Meyer, 1997). Thereception of the exhibition was enthusiastic in Europe: “If ever an exhibition was worthcrossing an ocean to see, it is this” (Moore, 1997). According to Philippe de Montebello,


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the museum’s director, it was by far the most challenging and the most importantexhibition that he had ever inaugurated (Collins, 1997).

Similarly, a few years later, in 2004, at a preview of the third large-scale exhibition“Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)” (fig. 2 and 3), the museum’s directorexpressed his ambition that the latest presentation of Byzantine art “will enhance public

appreciation of the exceptional artistic accomplishments of an era too often consideredprimarily in terms of political decline” (Pyle, 2004). However, whereas the two previousshows read Byzantine art through its cultural contexts, the framework of this one wasdifferent, focusing more on the aesthetics of painting over details of religious culture andhistorical context (Gerstel, 2005: 331). The Metropolitan Museum of Art presented lateByzantine art with objects from nearly 30 countries in Europe and the Middle East, whichconstituted the Byzantine Empire during its history. Although Constantinople hadgradually diminished in power and surrendered to the Ottoman Turks, its art flourished.This exhibition revealed the radiating influence of Byzantine art to the Italian andNorthern Renaissance, as well as the Islamic world.

Fig. 1. Screenshot from the website of the exhibition “Faith and Power” still available at theMetropolitan Museum of Art website (http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/byzantium_III/index.html)


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By the time “Byzantium: Faith and Power” ended on July 4th 2004, more than 300,000visitors had seen it, thus making it one of the Met’s most popular exhibitions of the year.According to Helen C. Evans, the exhibition’s curator, it was the word of mouth, thepositive reviews and the ads that drew such a huge audience (Vogel, 2004). Thisglorious exhibition with “the ground-breaking opening and the dazzling array of art”(Strickland, 2004) received both a warm welcome by the critics and full media coverage.

In the very same articles praising the exhibition, both its organisation and display werepresented as a daunting and difficult task, since complex issues of cultural diplomacy ofthe object-loaning countries had to be overcome. Therefore, as Michael Kimmelmansuggested, such a demanding exhibition could have been done only by a great museum,maybe only by the Met at that time (Kimmelman, 2004).

Fig. 2. Screenshot from the Online Gallery Tour of the exhibition “Faith and Power”which allowed a digital exploration of the objects on display

(http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Byzantium/byzantium_main.asp)

It was clearly an exhibition conceived from the very start as a blockbuster and not as atypical museum show. According to Sharon Gerstel, one of the greatest challenges of

launching such an ambitious exhibition lay in presenting complex material to a highlydiversified audience. A period of such complexity, as the Late Byzantine, demanded adifferent type of approach and display. As a result, a number of visitors could not graspthe underlying meaning of the show. The decision to focus on the aesthetic qualities ofthe objects, on details and brushstrokes rather than their deeper meaning andsignificance may also reveal an attempt to avoid certain political pitfalls, as the art ofthese last centuries is linked to modern national, religious and cultural identities.(Gerstel, 2005).


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Byzantium, multiculturalism & the glory of the museum

In the years following the Second World War there was a considerable re-shaping of theworld system. The United States became an international player in terms of economicand political influence. During the period of success and optimism of post-war America,new visions of American society developed. The latest of these visions are expressed in

the movements of multiculturalism and political correctness, which are seen as facets ofa new, and morally assertive, view of American society, revolving around the efforts ofpreviously excluded groups to construct new identities in the American scene of politicsof identity (Spencer, 1994). Moreover, within the context of a globalisation that is about“the transformation of imperial power into supra-national operations of capital,communications and culture” (Shanks, 2004), market-led practises were introduced inmuseums. As a result, the two latter Met exhibitions were fully organised projects notonly on the curatorial level, but also on their marketing and overall management, thusaffecting the promotion and reception of the exhibited Byzantine art.

The exhibitions organised by the Met were difficult curatorial projects, as they entailedthe coordination of loaned objects coming from different collections and countries. For

the first time in 1997, only six years after the Cold War had ended, the “Glory ofByzantium” presented so many works of art coming from the countries of the dissolvedSoviet Union. However, in newspaper articles concurrent to the 1997 and 2004exhibitions, Byzantine art was still characterised as mystical and exotic, but lessotherworldly than it was in the past. Despite the fact that no one could predict whetherthe “Glory of Byzantium” show would get people to rethink the way history evolved, “noother Byzantine exhibition has gone to such lengths to spur interest in a slice of the pastthat few Americans know about” (Kimmelman, 1997).

In today’s multicultural and multivocal world, museums are challenged to reinventthemselves, adapting to changing expectations and conditions and responding with newforms of organisation, exhibition design, programming and services (Kotler & Kotler,

1998). They are under increasing pressure to enter a marketing loop that focuses onvisitor numbers and revenue; if they fail to reach and attract sufficient audiences, theyare not likely to survive.

Within this reality and in order to build attendance, the Metropolitan Museum of Artapplied ethnic marketing practices at the 1997 “The Glory of Byzantium” show, whichwas even characterised as an “ambitious enterprise” (Moore, 1997). The otherness ofByzantine art entered the sphere of the multicultural other. Several American ethnicgroups –Armenian, Greek, Russian and Ukrainian- were the museum’s target groupswith advertisements of the exhibition tailored in their own language and their differentcultural identities. In only five boroughs of New York City the 1990 census countednearly 424,000 people of those ethnic derivations. The money in the “Byzantium”

campaign was estimated not less than $200,000 and it was “the Met’s most ambitiousforay into ethnic marketing, a rarity coming from a cultural institution” (Collins, 1997). Atthe same time, the exhibition received principal sponsorship and financial support frommajor banks and cultural institutions from the object-loaning countries. “Faith and Power”also drew a huge audience and was one of the Met’s most visited shows of the year.Jeffrey K. Smith, a professor of educational psychology at Rutgers University whoresearches visitorship for the museum, said that about a quarter of the audiencedeveloped an interest in Byzantine art after having been to the Met's previous Byzantine



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exhibitions, especially the last one, "The Glory of Byzantium" in 1997. By the exhibition’send, its catalogue was one of the best-selling catalogues of the year (Vogel, 2004).

Apart from the “other” seen as a well aimed at target group, another sense of othernessoccurred through the demanding curatorial work, especially in the “Glory of Byzantium”exhibition, which displayed works of art from the Byzantine cycle of countries with

contributions from Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, Hungary, Cyprusand the Vatican (among others). It was the Met’s genuine effort to present the ByzantineEmpire from the inside not as an exotic footnote to the history of the Latin West, but as a“complicated and diverse culture on its own terms, relevant to millions today”(Kimmelman, 1997). The Met’s curators, in their effort to organise such a demandingexhibition, had to negotiate with reluctant politicians, deal with deadly illnesses in thehost countries, travel across the globe in order to persuade monks and governments tolend specific objects and overcome problems in the artefacts’ transportation. Thecurators even had to exploit historical rivalries among countries and encourage a friendlycompetition for the status of being considered the most generous lender, as it happenedin the case of Ukraine and Russia (Miller, 1997). In the exhibition’s catalogue a long listof people from all the object-loaning countries were thanked for their collaboration. In a

New York Times article the Met’s special feat of diplomacy was described as follows:

“But she [the exhibition’s organiser] did not know the project would entail a dozen trips tothe end of the earth in less than three years, a three-month bout with malaria that nearlykilled her, praying with Orthodox monks at 4 a.m. at a remote Egyptian monastery, anear-confrontation with the new Government of Turkey, and enlisting Vice-President AlGore and former President George Bush to help lobby recalcitrant donors” (Miller, 1997).

Commenting on the same issue, Michael Kimmelman wrote that such shows could makesomeone sceptical, especially when hearing the Met boast that this exhibition was aspecial feat of diplomacy. Even so, despite the scepticism, he agreed that the museumactually managed to defeat diplomacy (Kimmelman, 1997). “The Glory of Byzantium”

was probably a triumph over diplomatic problems that occurred within or among thecountries involved in the exhibition. However, by overemphasising such a diplomaticspecific achievement in a multicultural world, a political subtext concerning the culturalother is revealed. Žižek, in an article on multiculturalism, argues that:

“In the same way that global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without thecolonizing Nation-State metropolis, multiculturalism involves patronizing Eurocentristdistance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one’s particular culture. In otherwords, multiculturalism is a “racism with a distance” –it “respects” the Other’s identity,conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed “authentic” community towards which he, themulticulturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universalposition. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content

(the multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the particularvalues of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly otherparticular cultures –the multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very formof asserting one’s own superiority” (Žižek, 1997).

When an institution or museum presents the art of a society as multicultural as theByzantine to an equally multicultural public and when the dominating social theory ofmulticulturalism is such a disputable subject, maybe the triumphant comments over



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diplomatic issues could have been less emphasised or even omitted. Otherwise, themuseum runs the risk of presenting itself as a modern Indiana Jones, the hero of theaction/adventure story, representative of Western culture and the dominant “American”ideology (Aronstein, 1995). Back in the 1930s, through the private collectors’ effort toform Byzantine art collections, glory was entirely ascribed to the United States, whichwas gradually becoming metropolis of art. Today, each museum is a metropolis of art on

its own. Our time is the time of “the Glory of the Museum” (Liakos, 1997).

Conclusions

Byzantine art entered the United States due to the private collectors’ competitivenesstowards European museums in the 1930s. Today, otherness is not perceived only on thelevel of the amazing exotica of the assembled Byzantine art objects, but also on the levelof the cultural otherness of the object-loaning countries.

In his 1928 magnificent poem “Sailing to Byzantium”, W. B. Yeats chose Byzantium ashis destination and as a metaphor for the magical and the faraway (Loughery, 1997).

Byzantium still remains that. An explanation behind the still unknown today Byzantineart, its role and its influence can be traced in Robert S. Nelson’s review of all the well-known general art history books from the beginnings of the genre in the mid-nineteenthcentury until today. The author -after closely examining art history books among whichthose by Gombrich, Janson, Hartt, Stockstad and others- concludes that the alterity ofByzantine art and the denial of its coevalness with Western medieval art have beenfeatures of general histories of art for 150 years and resemble the earlier ordering ofuniversal history professed by Hegel. Those histories are clearly written from thevantage point of Western Europe and America. An entirely different story would result ifthe narrative centre was shifted to Russia, Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, etc.On one hand, Byzantium and Islam are seen as relevant chapters in the rise of the West;on the other hand, they function as foils for that history and thus must be isolated from

the principal story. Moreover, Nelson believes that Byzantine art is not introduced inorder to say something about the actual culture of people living in the EasternMediterranean, but in order to define by contrast Western European art of the MiddleAges and therefore Western Europeans and Americans of the current age (Nelson,1996). It is exactly what the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas remarked “...[Words]signify from the “world” and from the position of the one who is looking” (Lévinas, 2003).

It is evident that art history presented in these textbooks transcends the various socio-political conditions in the United States. Byzantine alterity is sustained whether in themulticulturalist world of today or the cultural imperialist and cultural internationalist worldof the past. Respect and appreciation towards Byzantine art from a distance, fromŽižek’s suggested empty point of universality , and assertion of one’s superiority is

evident in both historical moments examined in this article. Whether received in thesocial context of cultural internationalism or multiculturalism, whether discovered by theUnited States when viewing themselves as the promising cultural metropolis, whetherdisplayed today in museums which are cultural metropolises striving to prove theirsuperiority, whether part of the West or of the Rest, one thing is certain; the sense of theexotic other is sustained, redefined and always existing.



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Katerina Biliouri

Όταν οι Η.Π.Α. ανακάλυψαν το Βυζάντιο: Μία ιστορία

πολιτιστικής ετερότητας

Κατερίνα Μπιλιούρη

ΠΕΡΙΛΗΨΗ

Το άρθρο εστιάζει στην υποδοχή της Βυζαντινής τέχνης στις Ηνω µ ένες Πολιτείες της Α µ ερικής .Στοχεύει να φωτίσει τους τρόπους µ ε τους οποίους έχει γίνει αντιληπτή και δια µ ορφωθεί η Βυζαντινή ετερότητα µ έσα σε διαφορετικά κοινονικο-πολιτικά πλαίσια . Συγκεκρι µ ένα , εξετάζει δύο στιγ µ ές στην ιστορία της κατανόησης και παρουσίασης της Βυζαντινής πολιτιστικής ετερότητας στις Ηνω µ ένες Πολιτείες . Η πρώτη στιγ µ ή τοποθετείται στην ανακάλυψη του Βυζαντίου τη δεκαετία του 1930 εν µ έσω της κυρίαρχης θεωρίας του πολιτιστικού διεθνισ µ ού . Η δεύτερη τοποθετείται σή µ ερα , την περίοδο της πολυπολιτισ µ ικότητας , µ έσω της µ ελέτης τριών εκθέσεων Βυζαντινής τέχνης που διοργάνωσε το Μητροπολιτικό Μουσείο Τέχνης στη Νέα Υόρκη: «Η Εποχή της Πνευ µ ατικότητας » το 1977, «Η ∆όξα του Βυζαντίου » το 1997 και «Πίστη και ∆ύνα µ η» το 2004. Η αίσθηση του εξωτισ µ ού που αποδόθηκε

στη Βυζαντινή τέχνη σε αυτές µ πορεί να ποικίλλει, αλλά το Βυζάντιο πάντα παρα µ ένει το εξωτικό άλλο στις Η .Π . Α.

ΛΕΞΕΙΣ-ΚΛΕΙ∆ΙΑ: υποδοχή Βυζαντινής τέχνης , πολιτιστικός διεθνισ µ ός , πολυπολιτισ µ ικότητα , βυζαντινές εκθέσεις Μητροπολιτικού Μουσείου Τέχνης , «Η Εποχή της Πνευ µ ατικότητας », «Η ∆όξα του Βυζαντίου », «Πίστη και ∆ύνα µ η»


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When the USA Discovered Byzantium-A Tale of the Culural Other

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