The Hegelian Implications of the Museum of Sex; or, Does MoSex Mean No Sex?

It has become a commonplace of art history and museum studies to recall that G. W. F. Hegel rather famously proclaimed "the end of art" in the nineteenth century and that he did so while Carl Friedrich Schinkel was building his Altes Museum, the first major national museum designed to house the Prussian state collection. 1 Art-historical and museological theories on the role of the museum in the "end of art" often locate the moment of this death in the Aesthetics, wherein Hegel asserted that "art ... is and remains for us a thing of the past." 2 For Hegel, art had become entirely historical, an object of study and contemplation. 3 Ironically, the historical conditions of his own "prosaic present," which he considered no longer "favorable to art," were the conditions for the birth of both the discipline of art history and the museum. 4 Thus, museum studies holds that the contemplation of art in the form of the newly professionalized discipline of art history and the museum itself are implicated in the Hegelian end of art. 5