Look on Our Works: Ethnography and Aesthetics at the Musée du Quai Branly

This thesis explores the relationship between a museum and its visitors through an in-depth analysis of the recently opened Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. I argue that the Quai Branly facilitates discovery of its collections as works of art and as ethnographic objects, but that the global significance of the objects subverts the definition of the collections as unfamiliar and thus complicates the discovery that the museum encourages. I demonstrate that this complex duality of discovery and familiarity reflects the reality of the relationships between cultures in the globalized world