Curating Pop speaks to the rapidly growing interest in the study of popular music exhibitions, which has occurred alongside the increasing number of popular music museums in operation across the world. Focusing on curatorial practices and processes, this book draws on interviews with museum workers and curators from twenty museums globally, including the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, the Experience Music Project in Seattle and the PopMuseum in Prague. Through a consideration of the subjective experiences of curators involved in the exhibition of popular music in museums in a range of geographic locations, Curating Pop compares institutional practices internationally, illustrating the ways in which popular music history is presented to visitors in a wider sense.
Curating Pop speaks to the rapidly growing interest in the study of popular music exhibitions, which has occurred alongside the increasing number of popular music museums in operation across the world. Focusing on curatorial practices and processes, this book draws on interviews with museum workers and curators from twenty museums globally, including the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, the Experience Music Project in Seattle and the PopMuseum in Prague. Through a consideration of the subjective experiences of curators involved in the exhibition of popular music in museums in a range of geographic locations, Curating Pop compares institutional practices internationally, illustrating the ways in which popular music history is presented to visitors in a wider sense.
This book employs the figure of curation—the selection, arrangement, and display of objects, concepts, and things—to explore the cultures of platform capitalism. Considering its rise in the global art world as an authorial, meaning-making activity and an organizational-entrepreneurial endeavour, it looks at curation as the interweaving of innovative concepts, elaborate storytelling, and trusted experts leaking out from galleries to hashtags. Its logic encompasses diverse spheres ranging from high-brow art and the fashion world to low-brow experience economies and economies of authenticity, from confidence cultures and relationship gurus to algorithmic spectacles. More than an economy, “curate and be curated” is a diffused imperative amidst the disorienting spread of information that digital platforms enable: What to post, what to wear, what to eat, what friends to have, what music to hear, what films to watch, what places to visit, what socks to choose, and what opinion to have about serious issues like climate change, military coups, AI, genetics, space colonization, and cryonics, or everyday issues like football, fashion, and diet. Drawing on critical platform theory, material culture, and multi-sited ethnography, the book examines curated worlds of coolness, authenticity, and inspiration, including the luxury fashion brands Vetements and Balenciaga, Airbnb food experiences, and the figure of the life coach. The book argues that the curatorial imperative endorses an aspirational class imaginary and the idea that handling self-narratives is a strategic means of socialization that can assist upward mobilities as well as neoliberal narratives of well-being, promotion, and success. This book will be of key interest to academics, researchers, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, curating, contemporary art theory, critical management studies, and art history, as well as to more general readers interested in new media, platforms, and digital culture.
Find out how to get in on the booming pop-up scene PopUp Republic: How to Start Your Own Successful Pop-Up Space, Shop, or Restaurant is your comprehensive guide to the new world of pop-ups. This fresh text dives into the details of the pop-up industry, offering you a first-hand glimpse at pop-up success through stories, examples, anecdotes, and case studies. Additionally, if you have the entrepreneurial spirit and want to embark on your own pop-up journey, this forward-thinking resource features a guide to launching your own pop-up. Based upon a wealth of experience and knowledge, this book shines a spotlight on the differences between the pop-up industry in the United States and Europe, discusses the tools you need to create a successful pop-up, defines what, exactly, a pop-up is, the costs and benefits of the pop-up business model, the permits, insurance, and licenses that are needed to run a pop-up, and more. A $50-billion industry, pop-ups have become key features of the business landscape in cities around the world. From retail shops to restaurants, a wide range of customer-facing enterprises are embracing the pop-up trend. Follow the launch and operation of a successful pop-up, and learn from the experiences of other entrepreneurs Analyze case studies that shed light on the successes and challenges that pop-ups have faced Leverage expert guidance in building your own pop-up business model Identify how the pop-up industry is changing retail, dining, and entertainment industries on a global level PopUp Republic: How to Start Your Own Successful Pop-Up Space, Shop, or Restaurant takes a close look at the emerging pop-up industry—and at the ways in which this industry is disrupting traditional business models to make room for innovative entrepreneurs.
In recent years, popular music museums have been established in high profile locations in many of the presumed musical capitals of the world, such as Los Angeles, Liverpool, Seattle, Memphis, and Nashville. Most of these are defined by expansive experiential infrastructures centered around spectacular, high-tech displays of varying sizes and types. Through over-the-top acts of display, these museums influence and reflect the values and priorities in the public life of popular music. This book examines the phenomenon of the popular music museum outside the typical and familiar frames of heritage and tourism. Instead, it looks at these institutions as markers of the broader entertainment industry in the era of its rise to global dominance. It highlights the multiple manifestations of power as read across a range of institutions and material forms and discusses how this contributes to shaping the experience of popular culture.
A handbook of new curatorial strategies based on pioneering examples of curators working to offset racial and gender disparities in the art world Current art world statistics demonstrate that the fight for gender and race equality in the art world is far from over: only sixteen percent of this year’s Venice Biennale artists were female; only fourteen percent of the work displayed at MoMA in 2016 was by nonwhite artists; only a third of artists represented by U.S. galleries are female, but over two-thirds of students enrolled in art and art-history programs are young women. Arranged in thematic sections focusing on feminism, race, and sexuality, Curatorial Activism examines and illustrates pioneering examples of exhibitions that have broken down boundaries and demonstrated that new approaches are possible, from Linda Nochlin’s “Women Artists” at LACMA in the mid-1970s to Jean-Hubert Martin’s “Carambolages” in 2016 at the Grand Palais in Paris. Profiles key exhibitions by pioneering curators including Okwui Enwezor, Linda Nochlin, Jean-Hubert Martin and Nan Goldin, with a foreword by Lucy Lippard, internationally known art critic, activist and curator, and early champion of feminist art, this volume is both an invaluable source of practical information for those who understand that institutions must be a driving force in this area and a vital source of inspiration for today’s expanding new generation of curators.
Curatorial Challenges investigates the challenges faced by curators in contemporary society and explores which practices, ways of thinking, and types of knowledge production curating exhibitions could challenge. Bringing together international curators and researchers from the fields of art and cultural history, the book provides new research and perspectives on the curatorial process and aims to bridge the traditional gap between theoretical and academic museum studies and museum practices. The book focuses on exhibitions as a primary site of cultural exchange and argues that, as highly visible showcases, producers of knowledge, and historically embedded events, exhibitions establish and organize meanings of art and cultural heritage. Temporary exhibitions continue to increase in cultural significance and yet the traditional role of the museum as a Bildung institution has changed. As exhibitions gain in significance, so too do curatorial strategies. Arguing that new research is needed to help understand these changes, the book presents original research that explores how curatorial strategies inform both art and cultural history museums in contemporary society. The book also investigates what sort of critical, transformative, and perhaps even conservative, potential can be traced in exhibition cultures. Curatorial Challenges fosters innovative interdisciplinary exchange and brings new insights to the field of curatorial studies. As such, it should be of great interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students engaged in the study of curatorial practice, museum studies, the making of exhibitions, museum communication, and art history.
Remembering Popular Music’s Past capitalizes on the growing interest, globally, in the preservation of popular music’s material past and on scholarly explorations of the ways in which popular music, as heritage, is produced, legitimized and conferred cultural and historical significance. The chapters in this collection consider the spaces, practices and representations that constitute popular music heritage to elucidate how popular music’s past is lived in the present. Thus the focus is on the transformation of popular music into heritage, and the role of history and memory in this process. The cultural studies framework adopted in Remembering Popular Music’s Past encompasses unique approaches to popular music historiography, sociology, film analysis, and archival and museal work. Broadly, the collection deals with the precarious nature of popular music heritage, history and memory.
This book is an exploration of how time, space and social atmospheres contribute to the experience of taste. It demonstrates complex combinations of material, sensual and symbolic atmospheres and social encounters that shape this experience. Space, Taste and Affect brings together case studies from the fields of sociology, geography, history, psycho-social studies and anthropology to examine debates around how urban designers, architects and market producers manipulate the experience of taste through creating certain atmospheres. The book also explores how the experience of taste varies throughout life, or even during fleeting social encounters, challenging the sense of taste as static. This book moves beyond common narratives that taste is ‘acquired’ or developed, to emphasize the role of psycho-social histories of nostalgia, memories of childhood, migration, trauma and displacement in the experience of we eat and drink. It focuses on entrenched social dimensions of class, value and distinction instead of psychological and neuroscientific conceptualizations of taste and sensuous practices of consumption to be intrinsically linked to the experience of taste in complex ways. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, human geography, tourism and leisure studies, anthropology, psychology, arts and literature, architecture and urban design.
