Final Thoughts: Memorialization, Remembrance, and Narcissism

This a photograph taken of Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1907. Here, she is forever immortalized reading in the house of Henry Yates Thompson, in England. 

 The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum presents the narration of memorialization, of artwork and a lifetime, as something that is constantly evolving. Where it may be presumed that art history is stagnant in its remembrance of dead artists, the narrative that takes place within the walls of the Gardner Museum is active and malleable. The question of how public memory is to contend with sometimes conflicting and often complex threads of memorialization is ever-present when considering the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The choice of what to pay attention to, of how the narrative can unfold, is up to who is remembering, rather than the memory itself. 

It becomes, in of itself, Gardner's own chosen environment and media. It functions as a type of media that is an extension of the unique "I". The self of thhe museum goer becomes superceded by Isabella Stewart Gardner's self. It is the artificial limb of Gardner's memorialization. 

With this project, I hoped to provide a testament to the very human trait of narcissim, through Gardner and her museum. With my comparison to the selfie, I hoped to bridge the gap between the past and the present through the shared burning desire to be remembered that is present in every instance of humanity and the self.