Debating the practices of museums, galleries, and festivals, Exhibiting Cultures probes the often politically charged relationships among aesthetics, contexts, and implicit assumptions that govern how art and artifacts are displayed and understood. The contributors—museum directors, curators, and scholars in art history, folklore, history, and anthropology—represent a variety of stances on the role of museums and their function as intermediaries between the makers of art or artifacts and the eventual viewers.
Debating the practices of museums, galleries, and festivals, Exhibiting Cultures probes the often politically charged relationships among aesthetics, contexts, and implicit assumptions that govern how art and artifacts are displayed and understood. The contributors—museum directors, curators, and scholars in art history, folklore, history, and anthropology—represent a variety of stances on the role of museums and their function as intermediaries between the makers of art or artifacts and the eventual viewers.
This third volume in a bestselling series on culture, society, and museums examines the effects of globalization on contemporary museum, heritage, and exhibition practices.
This richly illustrated book presents a comprehensive assessment of the display of Maori culture from the nineteenth century to today. In doing so, Exhibiting Maori traces the long journey from curio to specimen, artefact, art and taonga (treasure). Drawing on extensive and groundbreaking research, Exhibiting Maori reveals for the first time the remarkable story of Maori resistance to, involvement in, and eventual capture of the display of their culture.Ranging across museums, world fairs, fine art and tourism, Exhibiting Maori fuses museum studies, anthropology, and visual and material culture to uncover a history of active Maori engagement with the colonial culture of display.
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. The contributors represent a variety of stances on the role of museums and their function as intermediaries between the makers of art or artifacts and the eventual viewers.
Contributors to this volume examine and illustrate struggles and collaborations among museums, festivals, tourism, and historic preservation projects and the communities they represent and serve. Essays include the role of museums in civil society, the history of African-American collections, and experiments with museum-community dialogue about the design of a multicultural society.
During the Mao era, China’s museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state’s own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present. In Exhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism—a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive—and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China’s future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. Denton’s method is narratological in the sense that he analyzes the stories museums tell about the past and the political and ideological implications of those stories. Focusing on “official” exhibitionary culture rather than alternative or counter memory, Denton reinserts the state back into the discussion of postsocialist culture because of its centrality to that culture and to show that state discourse in China is neither monolithic nor unchanging. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades.
In this revision of his dissertation (in religion, at U. of California, Santa Barbara), Burris (religious studies, Stetson U.) explores the development of a comparative study of religion as this can be deduced from the exhibits on world religion and culture at 19th-century world expositions. The book's four main themes are: the colonial mindset of the exhibiting of cultures and their religions, the effect of evolutionary theory on the defining of American religious and social hierarchies, the role of the expositions in popularizing the theory of social evolution, and the denigration of "primitive" peoples and their religions through comparative display. The text is as much cultural studies as religious studies and will appeal to those interested in American societal and intellectual trends of this period. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
With the question, "What does it mean to show?", the author explores the agency of display in museums and tourist attractions. She looks at how objects are made to perform their meaning by being collected and how techniques of display, not just the things shown, convey a powerful message.
