Revision,Revisionism and Rehabilitation,1959/1999: The American Century,ModernStarts and Cultural Memory

Abstract

This article examines how visits to two museum exhibitions in New York and an article about Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Venona documents in The New York Times Magazine, all on the same Sunday in November 1999, plunged active viewers and readers into revisionist debates about American art, culture and politics of the 1950s. The exhibitions are The American Century: Art and Culture 1950-2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and ModernStarts: People, Places, Things at the Museum of Modern Art. The article argues that this instance of visual culture, which combines experiences of exhibitions and magazine pages, can be understood as myth or allegory within institutional representations of remembrance.