Project A7, in the field of Historical and Cultural Anthropology, is dedicated to the Kunstkammer of the Württemberg dukes. From the sixteenth century onwards, mainly aristocrats created chambers such as these to showcase their status with the help of art and natural objects, ethnographica and other rare artefacts. These cabinets of curiosities evolved into art museums on the one hand and natural history and other museums on the other. Parts of the Stuttgart chamber have been preserved in the collection of the Landesmuseum Württemberg (LMW), among others.
On this basis, the project aims to show how changing representational demands, institutional settings and conceptions of art affected a collection of objects that served to represent aristocratic culture in the late sixteenth century and later (from the nineteenth century onwards) of bourgeois culture. Specifically, it inquires as to which value attributions and – basing on this – which processes of canonisation of art and cultural assets can be identified here. This becomes particularly evident in the period around 1817, the time when the king hands over the Kunstkammer to the state.
The focus on concrete practices, actors, functions, institutional structures and everyday necessities should help to answer the overarching research question: What concepts of art and aesthetic pragmatics underlie this corpus of artefacts that began as an aristocratic collection and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, became the basis of several bourgeois cultural institutions, thus shaping what we consider to be an identity-defining cultural heritage to this day?
In the Kunstkammer, analyses can be made of how the transition from an aristocratic (representational) aesthetic to the aesthetics of the nineteenth century took place, how it manifested itself in exclusions and new intakes and how institutions such as the museum later played a decisive role in this process. Ultimately, it all comes down to attributions of value and meaning, which are expressed in canonisations and selections.
