Why Exhibition Studies?

The consensus these days is that exhibitions have been unduly neglected by an art historical practice that treated artworks and artists in isolation from social and institutional contexts including their most immediate ones. Indeed, for at least the last two decades, exhibitions have started to receive an unprecedented amount of attention. This has largely been due to the emergence of curatorial courses and given their rapid expansion one could be forgiven for imagining that there is no need for yet another “field” to stake a claim to the exhibition as an object of study.