Analogons: Selections from the Collection

January 2, 2014 - May 15, 2015 Free Admission

Analogon: A thing which is comparable with, resembles, or is equivalent to another.

The artwork assembled in the lower galleries was selected and arranged to highlight analogous traits shared among disparate objects. Although the works represent varied aesthetic and conceptual points of view, there exist between them revealing affinities, echoes, and correspondences. A careful consideration of an object in connection with its close neighbor will allow for an enhanced perception of both.

The aesthetics of damage, fragility, and the passage of time . . . [are] the aesthetics of the ruin, conveying the kind of poetry that the concept of the ruin acquired in the eighteenth century. . . .
The implicit aesthetic of the classical ruin consists of lost beauty and vanished power. These were the attributes of the tragic hero in classical drama . . . “the vicissitudes of fortune which buries empires and cities in a common grave.” (Arthur C. Danto, “The Aesthetics of Mechanical Ruins”)