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

In the postrevolutionary period, the removal of art from the privileged spaces of palace and church facilitated the democratic mission of the earliest museum.8 As Beat Wyss has argued in Hegel's Art History and the Critique of Modernity, the secularization of art occurred at the expense of a general withdrawal of art from everyday life, representing a turning away from sensualism and the establishment of a museum-oriented, historical aesthetic that cut the ties between emotion and art. Historicizing sexual repression as past is a form of counternostalgia that ignores government regulation of women's sexual and reproductive freedom, sexual harassment and the problematic status of gays in the U.S. military, and the political manipulation of gay marriage, attendant states' rights, and a proposed Constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.