The Politics of Display

The Politics of Display
Author: Sharon Macdonald
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1998
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780415153263

Met lit. opg. - Met reg. 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. Description of the changing relationship between displays and their audience. It analyses the consequent shift in styles of representation towards interactive, multimedia and reflexive modes of display. Examples are taken from exhibitions of science, technology and industry, anthropology, geology, natural history and medicine, and locations include the United States of America, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Spain.

Exhibiting Cultures

Exhibiting Cultures
Author: Ivan Karp
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2012-01-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1588343693

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.

Sex Museums

Sex Museums
Author: Jennifer Tyburczy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2016-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 022631538X

Winner of the 29th annual Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies All museums are sex museums. In Sex Museums, Jennifer Tyburczy takes a hard look at the formation of Western sexuality—particularly how categories of sexual normalcy and perversity are formed—and asks what role museums have played in using display as a technique for disciplining sexuality. Most museum exhibits, she argues, assume that white, patriarchal heterosexuality and traditional structures of intimacy, gender, and race represent national sexual culture for their visitors. Sex Museums illuminates the history of such heteronormativity at most museums and proposes alternative approaches for the future of public display projects, while also offering the reader curatorial tactics—what she calls queer curatorship—for exhibiting diverse sexualities in the twenty-first century. Tyburczy shows museums to be sites of culture-war theatrics, where dramatic civic struggles over how sex relates to public space, genealogies of taste and beauty, and performances of sexual identity are staged. Delving into the history of erotic artifacts, she analyzes how museums have historically approached the collection and display of the material culture of sex, which poses complex moral, political, and logistical dilemmas for the Western museum. Sex Museums unpacks the history of the museum and its intersections with the history of sexuality to argue that the Western museum context—from its inception to the present—marks a pivotal site in the construction of modern sexual subjectivity.

Museum Politics

Museum Politics
Author: Timothy W. Luke
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2002
Genre: Culture conflict
ISBN: 9781452906096

Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture

Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture
Author: Gönül Bozoğlu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2019-09-18
Genre: Art
ISBN: 042963823X

Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture examines the politics of emotion in history museums, combining approaches and concerns from museum, heritage and memory studies, anthropology and studies of emotion. Exploring the meanings and politics of memory contests in Turkey, a site for complex negotiations of identity, the book asks what it means for museums to charge the past with political agendas through spectacular, emotive representations. Providing an in-depth examination of emotional practice in two Turkish museums that present contrasting representations of the national past, the book analyses relationships between memory, governmentality, identity, and emotion. The museums discussed celebrate Ottoman and Early Republican pasts, linking to geo- and party politics, people’s senses of who they are, popular memory culture, and competing national stories and identities vis-à-vis Europe and the wider world. Both museums use dramatic, emotive panoramas as key displays and the research at the heart of this book explores this seemingly anachronistic choice, and how it links with memory cultures to prompt visitors to engage imaginatively, socially, politically and morally with a particular version of the past. Although the book focuses on museums in Turkey, it uses this as a platform to address broader questions about memory culture, emotion, and identity. As such, Museums and Memory Culture should be of great interest to academics and students around the world who are engaged in the study of museums, heritage, culture, history, politics, anthropology, sociology, and the psychology of emotion.

The Politics of Display

The Politics of Display
Author: Sharon Macdonald
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2010-10-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1136878793

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. The Politics of Display 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. The Politics of Display charts the changing relationship between displays and their audience and analyzes the consequent shift in styles of representation towards interactive, multimedia and reflexive modes of display. The Politics of Display brings together an array of international scholars in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and history. Examples are taken from exhibitions of science, technology and industry, anthropology, geology, natural history and medicine, and locations include the United States of America, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Spain. This book is an excellent contribution to debates about the politics of public culture. It will be of interest to students of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies and science studies.

Curating Revolution

Curating Revolution
Author: Denise Y. Ho
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1108417957

Curating Revolution examines how Mao-era exhibitions shaped popular understandings of, and participation in, the political campaigns of China's Communist revolution.

Museum Bodies

Museum Bodies
Author: Dr Helen Rees Leahy
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2012-11-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1409484165

Museum Bodies provides an account of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices, from their emergence in the eighteenth century to the present day. As long as museums have existed, their visitors have been scrutinised, both formally and informally, and their behaviour calibrated as a register of cognitive receptivity and cultural competence. Yet there has been little sustained theoretical or practical attention given to the visitors' embodied encounter with the museum. In Museum Bodies Helen Rees Leahy discusses the politics and practice of visitor studies, and the differentiation and exclusion of certain bodies on the basis of, for example, age, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity and disability. At a time when museums are more than ever concerned with size, demographic mix and the diversity of their audiences, as well as with the ways in which visitors engage with and respond to institutional space and content, this wide-ranging study of visitors' embodied experience of the museum is long overdue.

The Politics of Pure Science

The Politics of Pure Science
Author: Daniel S. Greenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 1999-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780226306322

Dispelling the myth of scientific purity and detachment, Daniel S. Greenberg documents in revealing detail the political processes that underpinned government funding of science from the 1940s to the 1970s.