Art and Ambiguity: An Extended Review of <i>Border Zones</i> at the Museum of Anthropology, British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the last decade, an emphasis on aesthetics has become a prominent strategy for ethnographic museums that try to sever their connections to a history of colonialism and to overcome the dilemmas and difficulties involved in representing societies and cultures that are different from their own. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, aesthetics and art are projected as being intuitively understandable—a common ground where the politics of representation can be avoided. This article reviews the exhibition entitled Border Zones: New Art Across Cultures, which is a temporary exhibition that, following a lengthy rebuilding period, opened at the Museum of Anthropology (MoA) in Vancouver in 2010. In this article, I attempt to situate the exhibition within the MoA's own “exhibitionary narrative” and within a landscape of contemporary art. I argue that Border Zones represents a continuity with the MoA's permanent exhibitions but question the extent to which it lives up to the MoA's own vision of “multiversity” or a critical museology based on the need to deconstruct the pretensions of Western science. [ethnographic museums, aesthetics, primitivism, Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia]
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.019 | 0.028 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".