AH 287 Culture on Display: Home

""a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarly writing... a comprehensive critical survey of the literature on cultural heritage and tourism and associated issues in the fields of cultural and media studies over the previous decade. These concepts and issues are clearly presented and exemplified in the case studies of numerous sites of cultural display..." Southern Review"

"We live in a museum age," writes Steven Conn in Do Museums Still Need Objects? And indeed, at the turn of the twenty-first century, more people are visiting museums than ever before. There are now over 17,500 accredited museums in the United States, averaging approximately 865 million visits a year, more than two million visits a day. New museums have proliferated across the cultural landscape even as older ones have undergone transformational additions: from the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan in New York to the High in Atlanta and the Getty in Los Angeles. If the golden age of museum-building came a century ago, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Field Museum of Natural History, and others were created, then it is fair to say that in the last generation we have witnessed a second golden age. By closely observing the cultural, intellectual, and political roles that museums play in contemporary society, while also delving deeply into their institutional histories, historian Steven Conn demonstrates that museums are no longer seen simply as houses for collections of objects. Conn ranges across a wide variety of museum types--from art and anthropology to science and commercial museums--asking questions about the relationship between museums and knowledge, about the connection between culture and politics, about the role of museums in representing non-Western societies, and about public institutions and the changing nature of their constituencies.

Bringing together museum directors, curators, and scholars in art history, folklore, history, and anthropology, Exhibiting Cultures engages in debate over meaning and representation that have accompanied and driven museums' efforts regarding multiculturalism.

This anthology provides a multivocal critique of the exhibition of contemporary art, bringing together the writings of artists, curators, and theorists. Collectively these diverse perspectives are united by the notion that although the focus for modernist discussion was individual works of art, it is the exhibition that is the prime cultural carrier of contemporaneity. The texts encompass exhibition design and form; exhibitions that are object-based, live, or discursive; projects that no longer rely on a physical space to be visited in person; artists' responses to being curated and their reflections on the potential of acting curatorially.

If social justice is Fred Wilson's subject, the museum is his medium. By placing meticulously rendered objects in environments that carefully recreate the details of a museum setting, down to their wall colors, lighting, display cases and wall labels, Wilson incisively explores the question of how the museum consciously and unconsciously perpetuates racist beliefs and behavior. From Egyptian and classical Greek and Roman sculpture to African-American memorabilia, from the primativist painting of Picasso to the uniforms worn by often black museum guards, Wilson's provocative juxtapositions speak to a complex history of museological omission, manipulation and oversight. This book marks the artist's first mid-career survey.

Art museums and public galleries amass collections in order to preserve, document, research and exhibit collective histories as a culture. Edited by Anthony Kiendl, Obsession, Compulsion, Collection is a compilation of essays by leading Canadian and International curators and artists who explore collecting as a cultural act.

The assumption that museum exhibitions, particularly those concerned with science and technology, are somehow neutral and impartial is today being challenged both in the public arena and in the academy. This title brings together studies of contemporary and historical exhibitions and contends that exhibitions are never, and never have been, above politics. Rather, technologies of display and ideas about science and objectivity are mobilized to tell stories of progress, citizenship, racial and national difference. The display of the Enola Gay, the aircraft which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, is a well-known case in point.