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Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
Broken News
A Letter From Engels to the Corpse
via Bill Berkson
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Not That They Asked

To start from scratch: The French Revolution began the museum by opening the Louvre to the public in 1793; Napoleon and his man Vivant Denon enhanced it by looting the rest of Europe plus Egypt, and organizing the galleries (as they are today) by national schools centered on Ancient Greece and Rome and culminating magisterially in the French school. The general idea that put over the plans for the National Gallery (London) against the art-hating disposition of the landed gentry and midlands industrialists was that by viewing great art & thus educating their taste for the finer things the great unwashed would become civilized and thus more capable of acting responsibly in a democracy. The same idea was used by J.P. Morgan to convince New Yorkers about building the Metropolitan Museum. & lest we forget, the Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929 (!) by Blanchette Rockefeller and controlled for most of its collection-building glory years by her son Governor Nelson. But that is another story, none of which, for my money, hurts the pictures..

Very truly yours,

Frederich Engels

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