Re-Imagining the Museum presents new interpretations of museum history and contemporary museum practices.
Through a range of case studies from the UK, North America and Australia, Andrea Witcomb ...moves away from the idea that museums are always 'conservative' to suggest they have a long history of engaging with popular culture and addressing a variety of audiences. She argues that museums are key mediators between high and popular culture and between government, media practitioners, cultural policy-makers and museums professionals.
Analyzing links between museums and the media, looking at the role of museums in cities, and discussing the effects on museums of cultural policies, Re-Imagining the Museum presents a vital tool in the study of museum practice.
Nature and culture Alberti, Samuel J. M. M
2017, 2017., 20171001, 2009, 2017-10-03
eBook
Nature and Culture asks how objects were collected and displayed in the twentieth century. It explores natural and cultural objects in the Manchester Museum, a major university collection. How did ...these specimens come to be there? What happened to them in the collection, and who used them?
Possessors and Possessedanalyzes how and why museums-characteristically Western institutions-emerged in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Shaw argues that, rather than directly emulating ...post-Enlightenment museums of Western Europe, Ottoman elites produced categories of collection and modes of display appropriate to framing a new identity for the empire in the modern era. In contrast to late-nineteenth-century Euro-American museums, which utilized organizational schema based on positivist notions of progress to organize exhibits of fine arts, Ottoman museums featured military spoils and antiquities long before they turned to the "Islamic" collections with which they might have been more readily associated. The development of these various modes of collection reflected shifting moments in Ottoman identity production. Shaw shows how Ottoman museums were able to use collection and exhibition as devices with which to weave counter-colonial narratives of identity for the Ottoman Empire. Impressive for both the scope and the depth of its research,Possessors and Possessedlays the groundwork for future inquiries into the development of museums outside of the Euro-American milieu.
Exhibiting Europe in museums Kaiser, Wolfram; Poehls, Kerstin; Krankenhagen, Stefan
2014., 20140415, 2014, 2014-05-01, Volume:
6
eBook
Museums of history and contemporary culture face many challenges in the modern age. One is how to react to processes of Europeanization and globalization, which require more cross-border cooperation ...and different ways of telling stories for visitors. This book investigates how museums exhibit Europe. Based on research in nearly 100 museums across the Continent and interviews with cultural policy makers and museum curators, it studies the growing transnational activities of state institutions, societal organizations, and people in the museum field such as attempts to Europeanize collection policy and collections as well as different strategies for making narratives more transnational like telling stories of European integration as shared history and discussing both inward and outward migration as a common experience and challenge. The book thus provides fascinating insights into a fast-changing museum landscape in Europe with wider implications for cultural policy and museums in other world regions.
This very practical book guides museums on how to create the highest quality experience possible for their visitors. Creating an environment that supports visitor engagement with collections means ...examining every stage of the visit, from the initial impetus to go to a particular institution, to front-of-house management, interpretive approach and qualitative analysis afterwards.
This holistic approach will be immensely helpful to museums in meeting the needs and expectations of visitors and building their audience.
This book features:
includes chapter introductions and discussion sections
supporting case studies to show how ideas are put into practice
a lavish selection of tables, figures and plates to support and illustrate the discussion
boxes showing ideas, models and planning suggestions to guide development
an up-to-date bibliography of landmark research.
The Engaging Museum offers a set of principles that can be adapted to any museum in any location and will be a valuable resource for institutions of every shape and size, as well as a vital addition to the reading lists of museum studies students.
Das Museumserlebnis ergibt sich nicht nur aus dem Konzept einer Ausstellung, auch das Publikum bringt hohe Handlungs- und Gestaltungskompetenzen mit, die bisher kaum beachtet wurden. Mit ihrer ...umfassenden Untersuchung des Tribal Museums in Bhopal liefert Ina Roß eine erste Studie zur Wirkmächtigkeit von Museumsbesucher*innen. Sie gibt detaillierte Einsichten in eine nicht-westliche Kulturinstitution, die sich als dynamischer sozialer Raum erweist, dessen Nutzung vom Publikum eigeninitiativ und alltagsorientiert mitbestimmt wird. Diese neue Form postkolonialer Museumsproduktion zwischen Institution, Source Community und Publikum bietet Inspiration für Museen weltweit.
Life on Display Karen A. Rader, Victoria E. M. Cain
2014, 2014-10-03
eBook
Rich with archival detail and compelling characters, Life on Display uses the history of biological exhibitions to analyze museums' shifting roles in twentieth-century American science and society. ...Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain chronicle profound changes in these exhibitions—and the institutions that housed them—between 1910 and 1990, ultimately offering new perspectives on the history of museums, science, and science education.Rader and Cain explain why science and natural history museums began to welcome new audiences between the 1900s and the 1920s and chronicle the turmoil that resulted from the introduction of new kinds of biological displays. They describe how these displays of life changed dramatically once again in the 1930s and 1940s, as museums negotiated changing, often conflicting interests of scientists, educators, and visitors. The authors then reveal how museum staffs, facing intense public and scientific scrutiny, experimented with wildly different definitions of life science and life science education from the 1950s through the 1980s. The book concludes with a discussion of the influence that corporate sponsorship and blockbuster economics wielded over science and natural history museums in the century's last decades.A vivid, entertaining study of the ways science and natural history museums shaped and were shaped by understandings of science and public education in the twentieth-century United States, Life on Display will appeal to historians, sociologists, and ethnographers of American science and culture, as well as museum practitioners and general readers.
What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial ...heterotopia? This pioneering volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of curatorship. It reviews the different models and approaches operating in museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world and discusses emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. The collection explores the ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into more reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship in the present, arguing that this is the most effective way for curatorial practice to remain meaningful. International in scope, the volume covers three regions: Europe, North America and the Pacific.What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial heterotopia? This pioneering volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of curatorship. It reviews the different models and approaches operating in museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world and discusses emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. The collection explores the ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into more reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship in the present, arguing that this is the most effective way for curatorial practice to remain meaningful. International in scope, the volume covers three regions: Europe, North America and the Pacific.
Museums have long been viewed as exclusive, excluding, and as antiseptic to intimacy. In the past few decades, however, humanized experiences—cultivated by curators, educators, artists, activists, ...and marketers alike—have emerged as the reason for being for these cornerstones of community. Such experiences are often possible only in museum settings, where cultural exploration, probing conversation, and safe risk-taking can occur in spaces now becoming sacred through inclusiveness. This book brings together an interdisciplinary collection of essays examining the kinds of human experiences and interactions that have converted the once-sterile museum into a space of enlivenment and enrichment, as well as physical and emotional well-being. The essays focus for the first time on the uniquely human and humanizing experiences to be found in the collections, programs, exhibitions, and spaces of today’s museums.
We have long recognized that many objects in museums were originally on display in temples, shrines, or monasteries, and were religiously significant to the communities that created and used them. ...How, though, are such objects to be understood, described, exhibited, and handled now that they are in museums? Are they still sacred objects, or formerly sacred objects that are now art objects, or are they simultaneously objects of religious and artistic significance, depending on who is viewing the object? These objects not only raise questions about their own identities, but also about the ways we understand the religious traditions in which these objects were created and which they represent in museums today.
Bringing together religious studies scholars and museum curators,Sacred Objects in Secular Spacesis the first volume to focus on Asian religions in relation to these questions. The contributors analyze an array of issues related to the exhibition in museums of objects of religious significance from Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh traditions. The "lives" of objects are considered, along with the categories of "sacred" and "profane", "religious" and "secular".
As interest in material manifestations of religious ideas and practices continues to grow,Sacred Objects in Secular Spacesis a much-needed contribution to religious and Asian studies, anthropology of religion and museums studies.
