Looking at the One and Only: The Return of the Single-Work Show

Today’s museums are using their collections in new ways, most notably as event resources for institutional programming. The current context of collection repurposing is a phenomenon much broader than the logic exposed by François Mairesse under the rubric of “the museum as spectacle.”[1] It participates in the larger paradigm of what we call the “museum as event.” [2] The high point of the museum as spectacle was emblematized by the rise of the blockbuster exhibition and the multiplication of museum buildings erected as grand architectural gestures: these involved programming and expansion. The museum as event is a logic that permeates every part and aspect of the institution, including the collections that the spectacular museum rather took for granted and often neglected. It appears important, therefore, when addressing the issue of the relations between a museum and its collections, not to focus exclusively on the renewal of permanent displays, but to also question how collections are impacted by the intrusion of events into their territory. What are the new curatorial strategies, the new or renewed exhibition formulas that are deployed in order to “awaken” the collections and bring them into the fast and convulsive time of the event? For our study of this phenomenon, rather than look at collection-based exhibitions, increasingly popular among art museums, or permanent collection reinstallations, we chose to focus on a seasoned formula that is making an often innovative comeback: the single-work show.