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The analogy of the exhibition as an experiment suggests innovative curatorial approaches that challenge institutional practices. This analogy has however a historical precedence in modernism when it became paradigmatic of the exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1940s, defining the curatorial approach of its founding director Alfred J Barr. This article considers this early use of the analogy of the exhibition as an experiment and further reflects on its redefinition at the turn of the 20th century by examining how both the notions of the exhibition and of the experiment have changed over time. In particular, the article examines the different meanings and practices inferred by the concepts of the exhibition and the experiment in the first decades of the 20th century and in the present. It outlines how correspondences between cultural and scientific paradigms can be deployed to tease unacknowledged synergies between two modes of knowledge production (i.e. the art exhibition and the experiment) and address questions of presentness, authority and legitimacy that they imply.

Emotions are both central to life experience itself and highly pertinent to various disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, social studies, philosophy, and the arts. The definition of emotion lies at the interface of nature and culture reflecting an understanding of the components that shape emotional states and experiences across time and cultures. This review describes how the concept of emotion developed in Western thought, from the Renaissance notion of the passions to the 19th century idea of ‘emotion’.

By comparing early modern cases of self-starvation with current theories of anorexia nervosa, this article explores the framing of the starving body as a cultural product, and questions the implications of culture in the perception and representations of the refusal of food. This allows a consideration of self-starvation as both a product and reflection of cultural values attributed to consumption, gender, and the body.

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