Thomas Huston
Thomas Huston
"How is a museum like a bird house?" asks Thomas Huston, who walks us through the philosophy and magic of the ways museums install art work—the usually unseen process by which the skilled labor of art handlers transforms intentions into aesthetic experience. His stories cover the wonders of legerdemain, the Digesting Duck, Renzo Piano, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Elvis, shims, vitrines, hygrothermographs, autopsies and condition reports, Amazonian parrots, mechanical watches, the polyurethane sculptures of John Chamberlain, pretty much everything from the white cube to the Atlantic Ocean. It's all there. No art historian could have written this book, or even imagined it. But every art historian should read it. And artists too. And art handlers. And Magicians, who could probably learn a thing or two from art handlers.
— Joseph Grigely