Exhibition is a difficult thing. It means selecting and installing and arguing, and it is improvisational, a way things on display also show their ongoing precocity and autonomy. I wrote the following text in the months before Byzantine Things in the World opened at the Menil Collection in Houston, and this text was the gallery guide for the show. The exhibition ran from May 3 to August 18, 2013. The Menil provides very little verbal guidance to visitors, and no wall texts (beyond title and sponsors, and very basic wall labels) were included. For those who did not purchase the catalogue and who still wanted some information, this text written for the gallery guide was the only real resource. I include this text here in order to provide a prelude to the chapter following, because some of the arguments presented here were preliminary, as it turned out, and they needed more careful consideration after spending the summer of 2013, on and off, in Byzantine things’ company.

Byzantine Things in the World Gallery Guide (March 2, 2013)

Byzantine things do work and act in the world in ways that art never can. On the one hand, Byzantine art concerns the aesthetic qualities of such objects, the exquisite qualities that allow them to be displayed and hung like easel paintings done by Titian or Ingres. On the other hand, things perform actively in the world and change all the other things (and here people are included) in their vicinity. They are not inert and passive, waiting to be seen by a person standing in front of them (though the things here will appear, in some ways, to be waiting, too—they’re not). The company things keep often determines that appearance of attendance on our gallery-going attention.