Musée imaginaire

The term is closely associated with André Malraux's Musée imaginaire, an essay from 1947 in which the principle it refers to is dramatised.

To his own admission, "'Une expérience' seulement… et forcément décevante, puisque par définition le musée imaginaire, rassemblant les œuvres d'Art de toutes les civilisations et les âges de l'humanité, est imaginaire, insaisissable et ne peut avoir d'existence que dans nos mémoires."

[4] More recently, Nicolas Malevé has compared the scale of Malraux's Musée imaginaire to that of datasets for training computer vision, such as ImageNet.

As Douglas Crimp noted, Malraux's Musée imaginaire depends upon the existence of photographs.

In Malevé's words, Crimp argued that "art history cannot produce a universal plane of comparison without another organising device: photography“.