Who Needs 'Exhibition Studies'?

The appeal to the exhibition as a field of “studies”—in a manner inaugurated by “area studies” and popularized by count¬less other thematically constructed scholarly discourses such as “cultural studies,” “gender studies,” “animal studies”…—already implicitly suggests a critical refusal of disciplinarity or, at the very least, an ability to function across disciplinary borders. However, given that the most direct disciplinary restraints to the study of exhibitions would have historically come not just from Art History, but perhaps most directly from either Museum studies or Curatorial studies, the will to further “undiscipline” this knowledge seems paradoxically entangled with a desire for further disciplinary differentiation. As such, it is a move that demands some scrutiny—in what follows, it is the negotiation of these borders that is scrutinised.