AH C170A: Museum Studies Midterm

Museums and Heritage

1. Heritage is more narrative and culturally driven than history. 2. Kirshenblatt- Gimblett defines the difference between heritage and history in that heritage is produced through processes of exhibition and display - mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past. Example: Ellis Island - How does a federal building become a shrine? - Short answer: restoration.

Museums and the Nation

1. Museums construct and cultivate nations. 2. The Nation - Imagined communities. Museums help serve this imaginary. They instill pride through a shared past. They are a vehicle for national identity/ ideology. 3. Museums are custodians of national cultural property.

Museums and Travel

1. Museums serve as surrogates for travel - If you can't go to Africa but you can view its material culture at a museum. 2. Museum house objects of travel - Souvenirs 3. Museums promise broader destinations. They are consumer driven.

Foster - The "Primitive" Unconscious of Modern Art, or White Skin Black Masks

1. Also criticizes the MOMA show for decontextualizing. Most of the primitive motifs, images, objects and styles have their basis in specific cultural tradition and ritual. He argues that modernism appropriates these symbols, reducing them to mere affectations.

Stephen Weil - Speaking About Museums: A Meditation on Language

1. Antipater's three mistakes: He mistook what was simply transient to be something permanent, He mistook the local for the universal, and he concentrated on the brick and mortar of human creation - the built environment of tombs and temples - to the exclusion of all those less tangible but more enduring human creations in which these were embedded: systems of religion, systems of law and governance. 2. Weil proposes that language is a more complex and consequential creation than it might have appeared to a writer in ancient Greece and some of the ways in which we use language, when we talk about our museums are deserving of more attention. 3. Language is important to the shaping and construction of our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. 4. He looks at the metaphors we use to talk about Museums such as "The Museum as temple" - This suggests that the attitude taken towards museums is one of reverence, that the objects partake of the sacred, and that those who work in a museum perform some kind of priestly function or protect a sort of holy grail. . 5. The metaphors we use influence what visitors expect. 6. "The Museum as Forum" - serve as a place of confrontation, interchange, and debate. 7. He reverses this metaphor and questions what visitors have to offer the museum. 8. The most stubborn of all museum metaphors - the notion that objects can be personified and that, in their personified state, they have voices that speak to us in direct or specific ways. 9. Museum that fail to understand the meaning is contextual not inherent, run the danger of misinforming their public. 10. The "forum" is where the battles are fought and the "temple" is where the victors rest - he argues however that once the battles have been fought, the stories that we tell in museums tend mostly to be the stories of victors, not the stories of the vanquished - the defeated have neither a temple in which to rest nor a story in which they can play the role of the protagonist. He questions what kind of stories we need to tell our visitors. 11. We must understand more about the stories we tell about what they leave out, and about what they modify. stories, like metaphors are inescapable. Reality is far too rich, too dense ever to be presented whole. 12. From thinking about Antipater we might some useful precautions. we need to moderate in our claims of what we know. we need to be sure that, in our concentration on the concrete and tangible, we do not overlook some intangibles that may be vastly grander and more wonderful. we need to be cautious in our use of language, lest it mislead us. we need to understand that our stories can never mirror reality in a perfect way.

Clifford - Histories of the Tribal and the Modern

1. Clifford criticizes the MOMA show on several grounds. One is that their method of comparison between the objects is flawed because they could have easily found works that did not resemble Picasso. The second is that the works chosen were decontextualized ad removed from their cultural and historical contexts.

Inhaling the Spore: A Journey Through the Museum of Jurassic Technology

1. Houses curious or strange technologies. 2. Museum oddities - Break the shell of certainty - not knowing or understanding something can be valuable. 3. Collecting - Not only people of wealth and prominence want to display the things they collect - what do you collect when you have limited space- became interest in collections of people in trailer homes. 4. All museums can be traced back to the idea of collecting/ especially oddities - The cabinet of curiosities. 5. Provides a place to connect with things that are strange and unexplainable. 6. Museum of parody and reverence - it has a spirit - one man felt it was like a church. 7. Deviates from most museums because it does not have white walls and displays set up in chronological order all separating from one another. 8. Objects should intersect with each other - museums should be a beacon - invite us and call us to stay and roam. 9. Human capacity for wonder and marvel.

Kirshenblatt - Gimblett - From Ethnology to Heritage: The Role of the Museum

1. In reinventing themselves, museums have become agents of "Heritage" 2. Heritage is metacultural - heritage as a mode of cultural production that has recourse to the past and produces something new. 3. Heritage is created through metacultural notions - that is the universal concepts that are present in all cultures. 4. Tangible and Intangible Heritage - Museums while repositories of tangible heritage in the form of artifact collections have always had to address the intangible aspects of culture - indigenous knowledge, belief systems techniques of the body performance. 5. the possession of heritage - as opposed to the way of life that heritage safeguards - is an instrument of modernization and mark of modernity. 6. Repudiation as an enabling condition - The enabling condition is willed disappearance through a process of removal, followed by the display of what has been made to disappear, as a foreclosure of it. Disappearance was and continues to be an enabling condition.

Mathur - Museums and Globalization

1. It is widely recognized that museums are central to urban redevelopment, and that the museum commission for an architect is considered the capstone of an architectural career. At the same time, the most recent economic downturn has led the media to increasingly speculate that museums are suffering from an identity crisis today, perched precariously at the financial brink while over-marketing their collections and sacrificing their institutional integrity. 2. The McGuggenheim Effect - Thomas Krens and his "Global Guggenheim" initiative. 3. Increasingly, it seemed that museums were not only being sponsored by corporations but that their practices were becoming entirely interwoven with a corporate model, effectively blurring the boundaries between the world of museums, the world of Hollywood, and the world of fashion design, while also creating a convergence of interests between these powerful economic sectors. 4. Argues that we need to distinguish between different kinds of globalisms that appear to co-exist in our current exhibitionary landscape. The latter refers to our contemporary global complex of display-based phenomena including the broad range of biennials and triennials, mega museums, blockbuster exhibitions, festivals of culture, world expositions, and science, natural history, and anthropology museums that coexist and compete at any given moment. we need, for instance, to identify those cosmopolitan practices that are socially progressive, worldly enlightened, and that potentially challenge the dominance of western cultural institutions, and distinguish them from the western pretensions to globalism by local elites such as Krens or George Bush. 5. A seriously global approach to museums must extend its gaze beyond a mere interest in the 'successful exportation of the Euro-American institution to other parts of the world, and insist on a wide-ranging view of museological forms, practices, and situations that would highlight different topographies of power. 6. Towards a postcolonial museum studies. Students should be encouraged to imagine, in other words, exhibitions we might see as more humane or more just; a critical museology should teach, in short, the capacity for social justice in our cultural institutions.

Svetlana Alpers - The Museum as a Way of Seeing

1. Museum has the capacity to make something meaningful. Story about crab to describe wonder of the object. 2. Museum Effect - Particular way of seeing. Turns objects in a museum into works of art and offers them up for tentative looking. 3. Everything put under pressure of tentative looking - Visual interest. 4. Museum success depends on ability to view without mediation. 5. Museums have become too educational. 6. She supports reading rooms but not crowding object with info. 7. Museums should struggle for freer viewing.

Carbonell - Intro to second edition: Museum Studies and the "Eccentric space of an Anthology"

1. Museum's identity as a domain of cultural practices and magnet for responses to those practices. Museums explicitly or unwittingly present the "material conditions of existence," the representations which produce meanings," and the "modes of production" and "signification" which constitute a sound basis for the study of culture. 2. Etymology of the term museum is useful in tracing the range and complexity of the subject but can never give us a definition. 3. Museum conveys concepts not only of preserving the material evidence of the human an natural world but also of a major force in interpreting those things. 4. Museum consider the "Public". Their tastes, rights, and abilities to benefit from the museum experience. 5. Concerned about heritage. 6. Questions what a museum can achieve. 7. Museums must be interdisciplinary 8. We need to have a more critical museum studies and we need to produce curators, thinkers, and cultural critics who are alert to the social processes of our time.

Preziosi - Narrativity and the Museological Myths of Nationality

1. Museums are uniquely powerful semiotic instruments for the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of meanings by fielding together and synthesizing objects, ideas, and beliefs. 2. Museums manufacture a two fold belief - in what its contents or collected objects signify, and in the independent existence or agency of what is signified. 3. Any critique of what is represented in inseparable from a more fundamental critique of what is understood by representation itself. 4. Things simply "mean" differently in different societies and also in the same society at different times and places and for different meaning-makers. 5. The relationship between forms and meanings is neither one of autonomy nor determination, but one of semi-autonomy. 6. Every political regime, ancient or modern, has always been fundamentally devoted to managing and controlling collective memory. 7. The aims and methodologies of art history, archaeology, anthropology, and aesthetic philosophy supported the fundamental hypothesis that the significance of objects would be historically legible in the style of their material formation. the belief that not only that the form of an object was a figure of it truth or being, but that the truth or essence or spirit or soul was the antecedent cause of its material form and style. 8. Ghost-Catching - presupposing that "national narratives" have an existence independent of the institutions and occasions in which we imagine them to be "staged". As if they somehow "pre-exist" the institutions and occasions for which they are to be "found" 9. Representation is fundamentally a double-edged sword. 10. Plato's Dilemma - signals the semi-autonomy and arbitrariness of what are distinguished as form and meaning; signifier and signified.

Clifford - Museums as Contact Zones

1. Objects have multiple meanings, mean different things to different people, different histories. 2. Contact Zone - Signals a space of encounters. Where people of different geographies come together - Such as indigenous and colonials,Tlingit and museum curators. 3. Contact can also mean inequality and conflict 4. Museums need to be approached through a contact perspective - whole new definition of museums 5. context around object always social or geographic. 6. Relations in museum define by asymmetry. 7. Contact perspective constituted through the movement of people. 8. The goal is to stimulate and encourage new forms of contact and encounter. 9. Encourage border crossings, privileges, collaboration and cooperation - We don't want it to turn into a conflict zone. 10. Rejects old model of universal survey museum - in direct opposition to contact zone. 11. Rejects that in favor of a more multiplex museum, more pluralistic. 12. Universal survey needs to rethink itself in days of globalization.

Duncan and Wallach - The Universal Survey Museum

1. Primary aim is to understand the way the Museum's ensemble of art, architecture and installation shapes the average visitor's experience. 2. Museums belong to the same architectural and historical category as temples, churches, shrines and certain types of palaces. The comparison is not simply a convenient metaphor: museums share fundamental characteristics with traditional ceremonial monuments. 3. They are not suggesting that museum visitors think of their experience as a ritual process. Rather the museum itself - the installations, the layout of the rooms, the sequence of collections - creates an experience that resembles traditional religious experiences. By performing the ritual of walking through the museum, the visitor is prompted to enact and thereby to internalize the values and beliefs written into the architectural script. Here, works of art play the same role as in traditional ceremonial monuments. 4. There is a typology for museums. The most important museum types are the large municipal or national museum devoted to surveys of old masters and monumental art through the ages, and the museum devoted primarily to modern art. Each museum type has its own characteristic iconographic programme. 5. The Louvre, the National Galleries in London and Washington, and the Metropolitan Museum of New York exemplify the universal survey museum. 6. The public museum as the universal survey type. 7. States differences between princely galleries and public museums. 8. Because it belongs to a nation and therefore to all citizens, the museums helps foster the illusion of a classless society. 9. In Summary, the Louvre embodies the state and the ideology of the sate. It presents the state not directly but, as it were, disguised in the spiritual forms of artistic genius. Artistic genius attests to the state's highest values - individualism and nationalism... The Museum glorifies France and it transcends France in its celebration of universal genius. Its final claim, however,, is that the universal is embodied in the state. 10. The Metropolitan was America's first great universal survey museum. The National Gallery in Washington D.C., was the last.

Case Studies and Controversies

1. Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinities Between the Tribal and the Modern - MOMA, NYC 2. Into the Heart of Africa - Royal Ontario Museum 3. Musee de Quai Branly - Paris Musee de Quai Branly: - Indigenous Art - Stems from political will to see cultural justice to non-western societies - restoring dignity - celebrating universality of expression - Consolidates many colonial museums in Paris - Heart of darkness in the city of light - spaces perpetuate living spirit of cultures to which the museum is dedicated. - Goal was to create more intimate spaces - Anti white cube space - 30 different multicolored boxes overlooking garden - Garden travels along the walls - Interior almost like a grotto - branches off into different areas - Free to move through as you wish - Jungle, earthy, primal

Kennedy - Some Thoughts about National Museums at the End of the Century

1. The schatzkammer 2. The iconostasis 3. The triumph 4. The gallery 5. The academy 6. Shrines to the Muses 7. The basilica 8. The rotunda 9. The hogan 10. The field of the cloth of gold Not all museums manifest the effects of all these prototypes.

Crane - Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum

1. What the visitor expects is not always what they receive. what effect does this distortion have on the experience of history, of knowledge about the past in its effects on the present, for the visitor in the museum? 2. Museums are not supposed to lie to us; this ct seams the breach of faith. Assuming that our own memories are fallible we rely on museums as well ass on historians to get the past "right" for us. 3. At stake then, in the current politically charged arena of museums and memory is distortion: distortion of the "past", distortion of the museum experience, memory distortions, and the negative charge associated with "distortion" in cultural discourse on memory and identity.

Findlen - The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy

1. the word started as musaeum and was a metaphor for the encyclopedic tendencies of the period 2. Musaeum was an epistemological structure which encompassed a variety of ideas, and institutions that were central to late renaissance culture. 3. Robert Harbison argues, the museum was - and still is - an 'eccentric space', a setting peculiarly susceptible to the cultural strategies of its creators. 4. Originally, musaeum has two defintions. It was most traditionally the place consecrated to the Muses, a mythological setting inhabited by the nine goddesses of poetry, music, and liberal arts. 5. It was a term little used in the Middle Ages; at best it was related to the idea of a studium, for it does not seem to have had any independent meaning of its own, save for scattered references to its classical roots, until the late 16th century. 6. important to the idea of collecting and encyclopaedism. 7. For the most part collecting emerged out of a private domestic culture that was almost exclusively male. 8. During the late Renaissance the parameters of musaeum expanded to include more public connotation. 9. The Museum as Mosaic