Animism, Materiality, and Museums

Book excerpt: Written in response to an exhibition the author curated at The Menil Collection in 2013, these essays challenge us to find novel ways to explore Byzantine art. They marshal diverse disciplines - modern art, environmental theory, anthropology - to argue that Byzantine culture formed a special kind of Christian animism. While foreign to our world, that animism holds important lessons for our own relations to the world. Mutual probings of subject and art, of past and present, arise in these essays - some new and some previously published - opening up new explanations that will interest art historians, museum professionals, and anyone interested in how art makes and remakes the world.