Dover-London Return

I went to the Byzantium exhibition at the RA today. It is a show of beautiful objects, collectors' items, carefully labelled to show provenance and ownership; and that is its problem. Its all about ownership, collecting and curating as the ability to bring together objects from prestigious museums as if this was some heroic feat. There are some explanatory, didactic texts on the walls but the labelling of the objects is unilluminating, as if the scholars and researchers want to keep all the knowledge to themselves. Basically it is just a show as catalogue, but a catalogue that does little more than list the items and display them as objects of aesthetic pleasure alone. Its almost as if the curators were so dazzled by the all the gold and enamel that they could not see the need to set the individual items into their artistic or even social context. So while there is a text relating to the general history of the period, there is no attempt to relate the objects to the history or subsequent development of Italian or Russian art or even the art of the Middle East.