Explores a crisis of modern America: the dissolution of place that leads to a dangerous rupture of community.

This chapter is written from the perspective of a practitioner and explores a range of paradoxes in museums and in the museological literature which may serve as starting points for conversations with philosophers. These include questions of definition and mission, intrinsic versus instrumental value, whether museums actively shape society or serve as a passive reflection, whether their main function is to produce liberating knowledge or express communal identities, whether traditional or progressive museums are the most ‘traditional’, whether (...) museums are trying to serve idealized or real visitors and, ultimately, whether museums are rational or ritual institutions. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the emergence of professional biology have privileged not only metropolis over province, but research over teaching and laboratory over museum. This paper seeks to supplement earlier studies of the 'transformation of biology' in the late nineteenth century by exploring in detail the developments within three biology departments in Northern English civic colleges. By outlining changes in the teaching practices, research topics and the accommodation of the departments, the authors demonstrate both locally contingent factors in their development and (...) continuities with existing traditions in natural history. The appointment of Arthur Milnes Marshall in preference to Louis Miall to the new zoology chair in Manchester in 1879 casts light on contemporary views of the laboratory and museum as 'equal though different'. The transformation in biology, in Northern England at least, was shaped more by such local institutional changes than by a phoenix-like rise of the laboratory from the ashes of the museum-more by the rhetorical construction of a professional academic community than any dramatic shift in sites. In this period the biology laboratory supplemented, rather than eclipsed, the museum, and the dichotomy between the 'naturalist' and the 'experimentalist' was far from clear-cut. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the emergence of professional biology have privileged not only metropolis over province, but research over teaching and laboratory over museum. This paper seeks to supplement earlier studies of the ‘transformation of biology’ in the late nineteenth century by exploring in detail the developments within three biology departments in Northern English civic colleges. By outlining changes in the teaching practices, research topics and the accommodation of the departments, the authors demonstrate both locally contingent factors in their development and (...) continuities with existing traditions in natural history. The appointment of Arthur Milnes Marshall in preference to Louis Miall to the new zoology chair in Manchester in 1879 casts light on contemporary views of the laboratory and museum as ‘equal though different’. The transformation in biology, in Northern England at least, was shaped more by such local institutional changes than by a phoenix-like rise of the laboratory from the ashes of the museum—more by the rhetorical construction of a professional academic community than any dramatic shift in sites. In this period the biology laboratory supplemented, rather than eclipsed, the museum, and the dichotomy between the ‘naturalist’ and the ‘experimentalist’ was far from clear-cut. (shrink)

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the summer of 2000, (...) evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

Over the last decades, in response to feminist, postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the modern museum, objects, collections and processes of museaIization have been radically re-signified and re-posited in the cultural arena. The new museums emerging from this shift have redefined their functions in and for communities not simply by changing their narratives but by renegotiating the processes of narration and the museal codes of communication with the public. They define themselves now not as disciplinary spaces of academic (...) history but as places of memory, exemplifying the postmodern shift from authoritative master discourses to the horizontal, practice-related notions of memory, place, and community. The key feature of these new museums is that they deploy strategies of applied theatrics to invite emotional responses from visitors: to make them empathize and identify with individual sufferers and victims, or with their own contemporaries inhabiting alternative modernities in distant places. This dossier seeks to probe these new museographic and curatorial discourses, focusing in particular on the memory museum as an emergent global form of monumentality. Drawing on different geographical and historical contexts, it argues that the new museums’ apparently global aesthetics implies a danger of surrendering the very specificity of historical experiences the memorial ‘site’ offers its visitors. (shrink)

Museums’ structures, spaces, and exhibits are understood as semiotic resources that make spatial texts that communicate a discourse defined by the authorities of the museum or its curators. The current study follows a social-semiotic approach in analyzing the spatial discourse of the Children’s Museum in Amman. It demonstrates that interpersonal meanings are semiotically communicated to children visitors in the Museum by firstly establishing a “comfort-zone” and secondly by aligning children visitors into groups with shared qualities, attitudes, and dispositions of (...) affiliation and solidarity, and thirdly by providing abstract and material representations of the real world that encompasses participants, processes, events, and places. These interpersonal meanings produce a pedagogical discourse that semiotically addresses Jordan’s energy and water challenges, and that can “charge” the Museum’s role as a “Bonding Icon” that stands for shared communal ideals that Jordanians might identify with, or rally around. (shrink)

The requirement by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that research proposals include plans for “broader impact” activities to foster connections between Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) research and service to society has been controversial since it was first introduced. A chief complaint is that the requirement diverts time and resources from the focus of research and toward activities for which researchers may not be well prepared. This paper describes the theoretical framework underlying a new strategy to pair NSF-funded nano (...) research centres with science museums in order to achieve greater success in the broader impact mission, and to transform the perceived burden of the requirement into an opportunity to provide enhanced value to the constituencies of the partnering organizations, as well as to the larger community. This partnership approach is presented as a model that also can be applied to NSF-funded research centres in other STEM fields, and to non-NSF-funded STEM research centres nevertheless looking to pursue broader impacts types of activities. The model also provides an opportunity to stretch the typical spectrum of broader impacts activities to include citizen engagement in science, technology and societal concerns. (shrink)

This paper reflects on affect and emotion as they relate to poetics — her/histories — in twenty-first century museums. Using specific examples, it considers the ways in which collections of material culture hold diverse meanings and how ideas are communicated to audiences over time and space but might also be challenged through imaginative activity. Key objects, exhibitions and activities discussed highlight masculinities at work in museums and include the temporary art installations by Yinka Shonibare and Fred Wilson in (...) the Victoria and Albert Museum's (V&A) Norfolk House Music Room in 2007; the portrait in oils of the Jamaican scholar Francis Williams, painted by an anonymous artist around 1745; and a contemporary oral commentary by Benjamin Zephaniah in the V&A British Galleries, which are considered through a feminist lens of poetics. (shrink)

Museums are key cultural loci of our times. They are symbols and sites for the playing out of social relations of identity and difference, knowledge and power, theory and representation. These are issues at the heart of contemporary anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. This volume brings together original contributions from international scholars to show how social and cultural theory can bring new insight to debate about museums. Analytical perspectives on the museum are drawn from the anthropology and sociology (...) of globalization, time, space and consumption, as well as from feminism, psychoanalysis, experimental ethnography and literary theory. These perspectives are brought to bear on questions of museums' changing role and position in the representation of the nation-state, of community, and of gender, class and ethnicity. The examples in this book are drawn from different kinds of museum around the world, and include significant controversial and experimental exhibitions; the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian; feminist exhibitions in Scandinavia; the National Museum of Sri Lanka; Victorian art at the Tate; the representation of race at Colonial Williamsburg and of colonialism and identity in Canada. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Museum Education and the Project of Interpretation in the Twenty-First CenturyRika Burnham and Elliott Kai-KeeThis is what we shall look for as we move: freedom developed by human beings who have acted to make a space for themselves in the presence of others, human beings become "challengers" ready for alternatives, alternatives that include caring and community. And we shall seek, as we go, implications for emancipatory education conducted by (...) and for those willing to take responsibility for themselves and for each other. We want to discover how to open spaces for persons in their plurality, spaces where they can become different, where they can grow.—Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom, 56In the art museum of the future, we walk into a gallery in which the hum of conversation fills the space. A small group of visitors clusters around a single work of art, exchanging their observations, led quietly in their conversation by a museum educator. The group has gathered for a program in which visitors are invited into a dialogue with the educator, with each other, and above all, with the artwork. As this group's conversation concludes, other groups will take their place, attending to different works of art, unfolding them in different ways.We share with David Carrier a vision of the future museum rooted in the Enlightenment dream of a sphere of conversation accessible to all citizens, a public museum space "devoted to a genuinely democratic talk about visual art." In such a museum the galleries are not primarily considered places where art historical information is transferred. They are instead redefined as places where conversation takes place around works of art and where the project of interpretation is constantly enacted.The educators who are responsible for these conversations have a central place in the future museum. Once charged with translating curatorial interpretations to the public, educators are now charged with including everyone [End Page 11] in the translation of the artworks. Knowledgeable in the collections and experienced with audiences, they bring people and works of art together for appreciation and exploration. Engaged in the exchange of thoughts and observations about artworks, carried into the back-and-forth flow of discussion about the artworks, visitors translate impressions into conjectures, and, ideally, understanding and interpretation.Visitors come to the museum to learn about art through gallery conversations during which they actively take part in a form of interpretive play that animates, and in a sense performs, works of art as visitors look at them and talk about them. When the play is successful, it is full of energy and passion. The museum galleries become active places where ideas are freely exchanged, where hermeneutic improvisation and experimentation are encouraged and valued.The constantly recurring play of art makes the museum a place of interpretive freedom, open to many viewpoints and the possibility of multiple interpretations. Educator and visitor both realize that understandings of works of art are never complete. They know that every conversation opens the artworks to the possibility of new meanings and new interpretations.In the museum of the future, the mission of offering visitors such special experiences is not distinct from the museum's traditional charge of caring for the objects in its collections. For it is only when visitors attend to the works of art, and interpret them, that the artworks come alive. As John Dewey said almost a century ago, the work of art comes alive in the viewer's experience. Visitors, educators, and curators share in the endeavor of making sense of works of art, each taking their own part in the process of bringing them to life with their scrutiny, and keeping them alive as they interpret and reinterpret them.The deepest and most affecting experiences visitors have in art museums are those in which they share in the unfolding, unraveling, and translation of the meaning of artworks. In the museum of the future, everyone is invited into such conversations. Everyone understands that they are important participants in the lives of the objects displayed there, as they take part in the play of interpretation that dances around them.Museums are first and foremost for people; they are... (shrink)

Critical Practice: Artists, Museums, Ethics is an ambitious work that blurs the boundaries among art history, museum studies, political science and applied ethics. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to represent key developments in institutional critique as they impact museums. The book elucidates the museological and ethical implications of institutional critique, providing a much needed resource for museum studies scholars, artists, museum professionals, art historians and graduate students worldwide who are interested in mapping and unpacking the intricate relationships among (...) artists, museums and communities. It argues that institutional critique is, at heart, a museological enterprise committed to creating reconciliations between museums and their publics. The volume will show how artists are uniquely positioned as both museum insiders and outsiders to encourage reconciliation. Critical Practice demonstrates how and why museums are drawn to institutional critique as reconciliation at pivotal moments in institutional and social history. By analyzing an international group of case studies, charting their attempts at reconciling museums and communities, it identifies key issues that institutional critique interrogates. In so doing, the book illuminates both the collaborative and contentious possibilities of these projects. Critical Practice is the first book on institutional critique informed by current debates in museum ethics and brings together a diverse range of literature to make it an invaluable resource for students of Museum Studies and Art and Gallery Studies. (shrink)

This paper considers some of the curatorial devices used in exhibitions at the South End Museum in Gqeberha. The South End Museum, which opened on 3 March 2001, is modelled in several respects on the District Six Museum in Cape Town: it, too, is an urban-based, self-defined 'community museum' constituted around the histories of the apartheid Group Areas Act and the implementation of forced removals. Like many post-1994 museums in South Africa, the South End Museum relies on photographs for (...) their displays, whilst also making use of maps, a mural and reenactment. The paper considers the ways in which these different displays touch, recall, reflect and activate one another. Keeping in mind that the notion of 'community' in South Africa bears the burden of being raced by its apartheid and colonial pasts, and abiding by the spectrality that is constitutive of the image, the paper grapples with the haunted space of 'community museums' in the Eastern Cape. While the South End Museum deploys some of the same curatorial devices as the District Six Museum, and deals with related histories of forced removal, South End, it is argued, brings the relation between race, indigeneity and 'ruin' within 'community museums' into fleeting focus. (shrink)

With the worldwide spread of the Internet, human activity has become permeated by digital media, which shapes communication and interaction and speeds up the improvement of the experience and diffusion of museum exhibitions. Contemporary museums must understand their audiences, especially with respect to online preferences and surfing involvement experiences. Museums are changing in an effort to attract young netizens to access and use museum resources. Virtual museums are increasingly using digital exhibitions to preserve and apply their (...) collections and establishing online community platforms to interact with young people. This study investigates the underlying mechanism of online community characteristics that enhance audiences’ emotional resonance and involvement. Results from a questionnaire survey of Taiwan undergraduate students show that perceived relevance and esteem improve their emotional resonance, which can attract new people and maintain existing relationships within their communities. Following flow theory, maintaining community relationship characteristics increases emotional resonance, which, in turn, enhances user involvement, but we found only small significant effects of emotional resonance on involvement. These findings illuminate the mechanism of the attitudinal relationship building and maintenance for online museum communities and advance the practical contributions of online museum community use and effects. (shrink)

This volume provides a comprehensive account of Wilhelm Röpke as a liberal political economist and social philosopher. Wilhelm Röpke was a key protagonist of transatlantic neoliberalism, a prominent public intellectual and a gifted international networker. As an original thinker, he always positioned himself at the interface between political economy and social philosophy, as well as between liberalism and conservatism. Röpke’s endeavors to combine these elements into a coherent whole, as well as his embeddedness in European and American intellectual networks of (...) liberal and conservative thinkers, are a central theme throughout the book. The volume includes papers by international experts from a conference in Geneva on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Röpke’s passing. The first part focuses on new biographical insights into his exile years in Istanbul and Geneva, while the second part discusses his business cycle theory in the context of the Great Depression, and the third part elaborates on his multifaceted social philosophy. Wilhelm Röpke was among the most important thinkers within the classical liberal revival post-WWII, with intriguing tensions between liberalism and conservatism. A highly recommended volume. –– Peter J. Boettke, 2016-2018 President of the Mont Pèlerin Society and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, George Mason University This important collection of papers provides an in-depth assessment of Wilhelm Röpke’s contributions, placing him in the context of his time. A fine contribution. –– Bruce J. Caldwell, Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy and Research Professor of Economics, Duke University. (shrink)

This article examines the diversity of tactical interventions that transpired at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019, culminating in the resignation of the vice-chairman of its Board of Trustees. Instead of accepting the myth of museum neutrality, the activist campaign, spearheaded by the action-oriented movement Decolonize This Place, treated the Whitney as a site of ideological struggle, permeated by inner divisions and conflicting interests. Through their organizing efforts, activists prefigured a movement-based form of cultural production, mapped connections between (...) seemingly disparate struggles, and built decolonial solidarities. While the activists’ actions were essential to stage the antagonisms that had been dormant in the institution, a multiplicity of actors needed to step in during the process, creating multiple pressure points and taking sides in the division. To amplify the Whitney staffers’ attempt to hold the museum leadership accountable, they sought to bring political protest into the institution, challenging the very principle of counting who belongs to the community and who is excluded. (shrink)

This paper argues that any museum's collecting policy must face up to the problem of vulnerability. Taking as a starting point an item in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I argue that the basic responsibility of museums to collect ‘things’, and to communicate information about them in a truthful way brings their collecting practice into the epistemological domain of testimony and into the normative domain of ethics. Museums are public spaces of memory, testimony, representation (...) and interpretation that at once enable humanity to hold to account those who transgress while at the same time holding to account those who witness these transgressions. By virtue of this, museums can be considered spaces of ethics wherein testimonial and hermeneutic injustice can be confronted and challenged. (shrink)

During the past thirty years, museums of all kinds have tried to become more responsive to the interests of a diverse public. With exhibitions becoming people-centered, idea-oriented, and contextualized, the boundaries between museums and the “real” world are eroding. Setting the transition from object-centered to story-centered exhibitions in a philosophical framework, Hilde S. Hein contends that glorifying the museum experience at the expense of objects deflects the museum's educative, ethical, and aesthetic roles. Referring to institutions ranging from art (...) museums to theme parks, she shows how deployment has replaced amassing as a goal and discusses how museums now actively shape and create values. (shrink)

As museums begin to revisit their definition of ‘‘expert’’ in light of theories about the local character of knowledge, questions emerge about how museums can reconsider their documentation of knowledge about objects. How can a museum present different and possibly conflicting perspectives in such a way that the tension between them is preserved? This article expands upon a collaborative research project between the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Cambridge University, University of California, Los Angeles, and the A:shiwi (...) A:wan Museum and Heritage Center to compare descriptions of museum objects by multiple expert communities. We found that narratives and objects in use are key omissions in traditional museum documentation, offering us several possibilities to expand our concept of digital objects. Digital objects will allow members of indigenous source communities to contribute descriptive information about objects to support local cultural revitalization efforts and also to influence how objects are represented in distant cultural institutions. (shrink)

Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov consider how rapture resonate's both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being.

Edo—Kingyo’s Coolness and the Night Aquarium Museum Lounge Content Type Journal Article Category Art Review Pages 1-2 DOI 10.1007/s11673-012-9354-2 Authors Katrina A. Bramstedt, Bond University School of Medicine, University Drive, Gold Coast, Queensland 4229, Australia Journal Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Online ISSN 1872-4353 Print ISSN 1176-7529.

This paper discusses the life and scientific work of José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage, a nineteenth-century Portuguese naturalist who carved a new place for zoological research in Portugal and built up a prestigious scientific career by securing appropriate physical and institutional spaces to the discipline. Although he was appointed professor of zoology at the Lisbon Polytechnic School, an institution mainly devoted to the preparatory training of military officers and engineers, he succeeded in creating the conditions that allowed him to develop (...) consistent research in zoology at this institution. Taking advantage of the reconstruction and further improvement of the building of the Lisbon Polytechnic, following a violent fire in 1843, Bocage transferred a natural history museum formerly located at the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon to his institution, where he conquered a more prestigious place for zoology. Although successive governments were unwilling to meet Bocage’s ambitions for the Zoological Section of the newly created National Museum of Lisbon, the collaborators he found in different parts of the Portuguese continental territory and colonial empire supplied him the specimens he needed to make a career as a naturalist. Bocage ultimately became a renowned specialist in Southwestern African fauna thanks to José de Anchieta, his finest collaborator. Travels to foreign museums, and the establishment of links with the international community of zoologists, proved fundamental to build up Bocage’s national and international scientific reputation, as it will be exemplified by the discussion of his discovery of Hyalonema, a specimen with a controversial identity collected off the Portuguese coast. (shrink)

Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and guided (...) by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

Once upon a time, a scholar, ascetic and relig-ious man named Abu Hamid Ibn Muhammad Ibn Muhammad al-Tusi al-Shafi'i al-Ghazali (AI-Ghazali, 1058-11 II) wrote a worl, called The Incoherence qf the Philosophers, 1\ clever philosopher, Abu AI-\Valid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Hushd (Averroes, 112li-1 ID8), responded to this by writing The IlIcolurence (!l the Inroherence. In IVhat is Art;;, Tolstoy refers to the importance of art in order to ridicule itl He notes the attention paid to art, music, theatre, filrn, (...) and books in the press. IIe notes the in\'(~stment of gm'ernments in the support of museums, theatres and the like. He notes the time spent by artists and perlilrmers in learning- their craft. He presents the most sardonic description of an opera rehearsal you will ever read. He describes the eHilrt and money poured into art as "stupefying", "repulsive", "a gigantic absurdity", and "utterly incomprehensible".~ I-Imv can art be so important that a peasant should have to sell his only cow to pay the taxes that maintain the artist-producer in grand luxury~. (shrink)

The protection of cultural relics has always been an important issue in the field of museums and archaeology. With the development of Internet of Things technology, the security system of the museum is more intelligent and integrated. In order for the museum display system to keep up with the intelligent age, this article mainly studies the research and realization of the museum showcase system based on the Internet of Things technology in a smart environment. Before the start of the (...) experiment, we developed the overall design of the system, including three functional modules: temperature module, illumination module, and monitoring module. The experiment is done mainly for system testing. The performance test of the sensor module needs to sample the temperature and humidity sensor to verify the accuracy of the temperature and humidity signal collected in the instrument circuit. The light information collection test uses the ADC sampling inside the CC2530 to obtain the required data and judges whether these temperature, humidity, and light intensity values exceed the preset values. The serial port needs to be initialized to carry out data communication and transmission normally. After the receiving end finishes receiving, the sending end will clear the data buffer to prepare for the next data transmission. The experimental data show that the error between the predicted value and measured value of the temperature system is about 3°C, which is within the allowable error range of the experiment. The results show that the system has perfect functions, is safe and reliable, meets the expected requirements, and has good practicability. (shrink)

Traditionally galleries and museums were one-dimensional, visually.These curators, critics, artists and gallerists developed multi-sensory art galleries, involving all senses. as well as living installations such as bees producing honey their books published. This is far beyond traditional installations and exhibitions. Night tours by torchlight, education, accommodation, therapy, participation, exploration, local community involvement and more are available.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 107-119 [Access article in PDF] Museum as Process Carol S. Jeffers Introduction Today's art museums are committed to completing major expansion and renovation projects, and vigorously carrying out their stated missions. 1 These missions typically are concerned with processes of acquisition, preservation, exhibition, and education. The National Gallery of Art, for example, is dedicated to "preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the (...) understanding of works of art." 2 Similarly, the Getty Museum at the J. Paul Getty Center seeks to "delight, inspire, and educate the public by acquiring, conserving, studying, exhibiting, and interpreting works of art." 3 Such processes are strategic, of course, and give direction and purpose to the range of programs and services offered by these institutions. Ensuring that visitors are surrounded by works of art, "at the highest quality," these processes also give rise to a particular view of the museum as an "object of reflection, contemplation, and discussion." 4Although unstated, I shall argue that art museums typically have other missions that are actively, if insidiously implemented through processes of representation (re-presentation), socialization, institutionalization, and commodification.The museum functions as a "socializing institution," that both represents and presents cultural assumptions, as well as social and aesthetic values to young and old alike. 5 These processes succeed in establishing an "ideology of aesthetic autonomy — the compartmental conception of fine art that segregates it to the separate realm of the museum." 6 Simultaneously, they present "ideology in material form." 7 The museum itself is a representation that tends to take on an independent and ultimately self-reflecting existence. In a Debordian view, "it is a spectacle, which, in its generality, is a concrete inversion of life, and as such, the autonomous movement of 8 [End Page 107] non-life." Through processes of representation and commodification, the spectacular museum is constructed as a frame that influences the public perception of art and society. Moreover, this ideological frame influences how the public experiences constructs of time and place, and how it comes to know about art in relation to the real world.Today's thriving art museums — and the various processes that deliver both their overt and covert missions — are likely to have a greater impact on society than ever before. With such potential, it seems especially important at this juncture to examine critically the art museum as process; to deconstruct that which has been "constructed as a symbol in Western society since the Renaissance." 9 In undertaking such an examination, then, the first task is to describe current museum impact on the public. Of special concern are questions about what the museum represents to its visitors, particularly to young students and teachers, and how these representations shape constructions of knowledge, conceptions of art, and roles for visitors and artists. Contemporary representations themselves raise questions about the historical context in which they originated, developed, and were carried forward. As a second task, then, this essay will present a historical-critical analysis that integrates several theoretical perspectives on the origins, development, and implications of the Western museum and its various processes. Next, I will consider the possibility and implications of visitor impact on museum processes. This last section includes examples of alternative museum approaches whose mission is implemented through active visitor participation in processes of conversation and community. Collecting and Exhibiting: The Museum as Sacred Grove The museum as a symbol in Western society is apparently recognized and understood as such, even by its youngest members. Children in the United States, Canada, and France, for example, can offer definitions of an art or other museum, and know how to "act and react" within one, even though they may have had extremely limited ornoprior museum experiences. 10 To these children, a museum is a venerable, quiet place, "like the library." 11 When asked, "what is a museum?" children typically respond with: "a place to collect things," or "a big place where lots of people go" to see "old stuff" and "lots of pictures." 12 In general, children seem to view museums as sites for exposition, and as repositories for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 107-119 [Access article in PDF] Museum as Process Carol S. Jeffers Introduction Today's art museums are committed to completing major expansion and renovation projects, and vigorously carrying out their stated missions. 1 These missions typically are concerned with processes of acquisition, preservation, exhibition, and education. The National Gallery of Art, for example, is dedicated to "preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the (...) understanding of works of art." 2 Similarly, the Getty Museum at the J. Paul Getty Center seeks to "delight, inspire, and educate the public by acquiring, conserving, studying, exhibiting, and interpreting works of art." 3 Such processes are strategic, of course, and give direction and purpose to the range of programs and services offered by these institutions. Ensuring that visitors are surrounded by works of art, "at the highest quality," these processes also give rise to a particular view of the museum as an "object of reflection, contemplation, and discussion." 4Although unstated, I shall argue that art museums typically have other missions that are actively, if insidiously implemented through processes of representation (re-presentation), socialization, institutionalization, and commodification.The museum functions as a "socializing institution," that both represents and presents cultural assumptions, as well as social and aesthetic values to young and old alike. 5 These processes succeed in establishing an "ideology of aesthetic autonomy — the compartmental conception of fine art that segregates it to the separate realm of the museum." 6 Simultaneously, they present "ideology in material form." 7 The museum itself is a representation that tends to take on an independent and ultimately self-reflecting existence. In a Debordian view, "it is a spectacle, which, in its generality, is a concrete inversion of life, and as such, the autonomous movement of 8 [End Page 107] non-life." Through processes of representation and commodification, the spectacular museum is constructed as a frame that influences the public perception of art and society. Moreover, this ideological frame influences how the public experiences constructs of time and place, and how it comes to know about art in relation to the real world.Today's thriving art museums — and the various processes that deliver both their overt and covert missions — are likely to have a greater impact on society than ever before. With such potential, it seems especially important at this juncture to examine critically the art museum as process; to deconstruct that which has been "constructed as a symbol in Western society since the Renaissance." 9 In undertaking such an examination, then, the first task is to describe current museum impact on the public. Of special concern are questions about what the museum represents to its visitors, particularly to young students and teachers, and how these representations shape constructions of knowledge, conceptions of art, and roles for visitors and artists. Contemporary representations themselves raise questions about the historical context in which they originated, developed, and were carried forward. As a second task, then, this essay will present a historical-critical analysis that integrates several theoretical perspectives on the origins, development, and implications of the Western museum and its various processes. Next, I will consider the possibility and implications of visitor impact on museum processes. This last section includes examples of alternative museum approaches whose mission is implemented through active visitor participation in processes of conversation and community. Collecting and Exhibiting: The Museum as Sacred Grove The museum as a symbol in Western society is apparently recognized and understood as such, even by its youngest members. Children in the United States, Canada, and France, for example, can offer definitions of an art or other museum, and know how to "act and react" within one, even though they may have had extremely limited ornoprior museum experiences. 10 To these children, a museum is a venerable, quiet place, "like the library." 11 When asked, "what is a museum?" children typically respond with: "a place to collect things," or "a big place where lots of people go" to see "old stuff" and "lots of pictures." 12 In general, children seem to view museums as sites for exposition, and as repositories for... (shrink)

Accompanying an exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, this book is the most comprehensive catalogue on the work of this internationally recognized architectural firm.

Résumé: Dans ce dialogue, deux personnages principaux, Philopolis et Éleuthérios, proposent la position communautarienne et la position contractualiste libérale comme fondements de la théorie politique. Le débat se déroule, comme tout bon débat devrait le faire, autour d’une bouteille de Chardonnay.

This paper discusses corporate entanglement, impactfulness and responsibility in the Anthropocene, amidst events and conditions that ‘uncontain’ time. It takes its direction of travel from artist Brian Jungen’s ‘Cetology’ (2002), a whalebone sculpture made out of cut-up plastic garden chairs, which conjoins the times of earth and world history, as it hangs in the air of the art gallery, ‘as if’ exhibited in the natural history museum. The paper relates ‘Cetology’s’ engagement with natural history, time, and commodification to matters of (...) corporate entanglement and responsibility within company law and governance. Problems with understanding the comparable imprint of large and multinational companies on matters, places, and communities are identified, after the domination of corporate legal frameworks over nature and the stability and perfection of economic incentives at law. The reading of this (critical-legal) situation is developed through theory and engagement with materialist and critical thinkers, who unite in their concern with distributed human–nature relations and the ‘concreteness’ that attends collisions in time, ruin and affect. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s writings are central to this analysis, and strengthen the commentary on ‘natural history’ themes curated by Jungen. The paper contemplates how times’ uncontainment might invoke a change in expectation and method for the company law field, assigning contingency to the corporation and provoking a new mode of reflection about corporate entanglement and responsibility at law. (shrink)

This paper explores the use of new scientific techniques to examine collections of historic scientific apparatus and other technological artefacts. One project under discussion uses interferometry to examine the history of lens development, while another uses X-ray fluorescence to discover the kinds of materials used to make early mathematical and astronomical instruments. These methods lead to surprising findings: instruments turn out to be fake, and lens makers turn out to have been adept at solving the riddle of aperture. Although exciting, (...) in some ways this is neither novel nor particularly unusual. After all, lab techniques have been used in art and archaeological collections for a very long time. In fact, scientific instruments themselves have been examined in this way since at least the 1950s. What, then, is special about the use of new instruments to examine old instruments? We argue that the answer has less to do with measuring historical innovation or establishing priority, and more to do with networks of craft know-how that, typically, have left no other historical traces than those embodied in surviving instruments themselves. We show, in particular, how collections of objects can be mobilised within wider histories of knowledge, placing instruments within a dynamic interplay of craft knowledge, expertise, labour, commerce, and material exchange, over the longue durée. Finally, we suggest that these kinds of lab analyses can be given an extra dimension through the use of computational modelling, and we introduce the “Tools of Knowledge” project, which is designed to bring together XRF with techniques from the digital humanities, in order to tell a new story about the development of scientific instruments from the 16th to the 20th century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"New" Media, Art, and Intercultural CommunicationBart Vandenabeele (bio)It is fairly common — but perhaps not altogether innocent — to avoid addressing new media and intercultural aspects of communication in one and the same essay. Here, however, both issues are treated together. I shall investigate, in a perhaps somewhat unusual way, the phenomenon of "new" artistic media and some related issues such as virtual reality, computer and telecommunications technology, (...) and cyberspace. I offer some philosophical remarks, especially of an epistemological kind, that are important to every debate in which terms like multimedia art, "new" media art, and screen based art occur. I argue that the novelty of some changes in the use of artistic media tends to be overemphasized and dramatized. Furthermore, I shall point to the lack of interest in intercultural aspects of artistic communication and to the relevance an intercultural orientation can have for reflection on the phenomenon of so-called "new" media in art.1It has often been claimed that art is the best possible window into another community. Art would be a universal language and contact with works of art supposedly offers the best direct or immediate internal access to another community. This is purported to be a kind of access that cannot possibly be matched by knowledge about the geography, religion, and history. Even John Dewey believes that "au fond, the aesthetic quality is the same for Greeks, Chinese, Americans."2 This idea is surprisingly reminiscent of Clive Bell's "discovery" of Significant Form in so-called primitive art.3 Dewey says thatbarriers are dissolved, limiting prejudices melt away, when we enter into the spirit of Negro or Polynesian art. This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude."4To this contention one could object in the following way. Immediate contact with for example, Congolese Nkisi nkondi fetish statues (in the museum of [End Page 1] African Art and History in Tervuren), which are bristling with nails are quite shocking to Europeans — such as Joseph Conrad in the Congo.5 Only by acquaintance with facts that are external to the artwork can one get real access to and understanding of them. One has to know that the nails are meant to seal dispute resolutions and that the statues "were considered so powerful that they were sometimes kept outside the village."6 Only when I know this, will my first perception be seriously altered. It is an objection that is often made against the privilege enjoyed by the immediate contact with the senses: knowledge of the "context" can enhance our appreciation of the art of the foreign community.Both the universalist view and the objection are flawed.7 First of all, we have to ask whether we can make such a sharp distinction between internal and external information and, second, whether it is correct to presuppose a typical proper aesthetics to make artistic communication possible. Is not every form of life already the (not fully definable) outcome of conscious or unconscious influence by other forms of life? What would be the so-called "own" internal aesthetics by which we should judge the famous "Turkish" Iznik tiles that reflect especially the Ottoman rulers' interest in Chinese porcelain, or the "Japanese" aesthetics of Zen Buddhism that is the result of a century-long historical interaction between Japanese culture and the new, foreign religion of Buddhism, which traveled from Japan to India via China and Korea? What would be the "typical" English garden, which was realized on the basis of travel reports from the Far East? And what of the Eastern influence on so-called typical Western painters as Matisse, Whistler, and Degas or composers such as Debussy, Messiaen, Ravel, Rimski-Korsakow and Puccini? What is clear is that it is completely unclear what is "own," "typical," or "authentic." Live communities are never isolated islands developing by themselves. It is as impossible to demarcate strictly the "proper" from the "foreign" as it is to find a universal language that would make artistic communication possible in an absolutely definitive way.Just as it is not necessary to share a language to communicate8 — this holds both for people... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"New" Media, Art, and Intercultural CommunicationBart Vandenabeele (bio)It is fairly common — but perhaps not altogether innocent — to avoid addressing new media and intercultural aspects of communication in one and the same essay. Here, however, both issues are treated together. I shall investigate, in a perhaps somewhat unusual way, the phenomenon of "new" artistic media and some related issues such as virtual reality, computer and telecommunications technology, (...) and cyberspace. I offer some philosophical remarks, especially of an epistemological kind, that are important to every debate in which terms like multimedia art, "new" media art, and screen based art occur. I argue that the novelty of some changes in the use of artistic media tends to be overemphasized and dramatized. Furthermore, I shall point to the lack of interest in intercultural aspects of artistic communication and to the relevance an intercultural orientation can have for reflection on the phenomenon of so-called "new" media in art.1It has often been claimed that art is the best possible window into another community. Art would be a universal language and contact with works of art supposedly offers the best direct or immediate internal access to another community. This is purported to be a kind of access that cannot possibly be matched by knowledge about the geography, religion, and history. Even John Dewey believes that "au fond, the aesthetic quality is the same for Greeks, Chinese, Americans."2 This idea is surprisingly reminiscent of Clive Bell's "discovery" of Significant Form in so-called primitive art.3 Dewey says thatbarriers are dissolved, limiting prejudices melt away, when we enter into the spirit of Negro or Polynesian art. This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude."4To this contention one could object in the following way. Immediate contact with for example, Congolese Nkisi nkondi fetish statues (in the museum of [End Page 1] African Art and History in Tervuren), which are bristling with nails are quite shocking to Europeans — such as Joseph Conrad in the Congo.5 Only by acquaintance with facts that are external to the artwork can one get real access to and understanding of them. One has to know that the nails are meant to seal dispute resolutions and that the statues "were considered so powerful that they were sometimes kept outside the village."6 Only when I know this, will my first perception be seriously altered. It is an objection that is often made against the privilege enjoyed by the immediate contact with the senses: knowledge of the "context" can enhance our appreciation of the art of the foreign community.Both the universalist view and the objection are flawed.7 First of all, we have to ask whether we can make such a sharp distinction between internal and external information and, second, whether it is correct to presuppose a typical proper aesthetics to make artistic communication possible. Is not every form of life already the (not fully definable) outcome of conscious or unconscious influence by other forms of life? What would be the so-called "own" internal aesthetics by which we should judge the famous "Turkish" Iznik tiles that reflect especially the Ottoman rulers' interest in Chinese porcelain, or the "Japanese" aesthetics of Zen Buddhism that is the result of a century-long historical interaction between Japanese culture and the new, foreign religion of Buddhism, which traveled from Japan to India via China and Korea? What would be the "typical" English garden, which was realized on the basis of travel reports from the Far East? And what of the Eastern influence on so-called typical Western painters as Matisse, Whistler, and Degas or composers such as Debussy, Messiaen, Ravel, Rimski-Korsakow and Puccini? What is clear is that it is completely unclear what is "own," "typical," or "authentic." Live communities are never isolated islands developing by themselves. It is as impossible to demarcate strictly the "proper" from the "foreign" as it is to find a universal language that would make artistic communication possible in an absolutely definitive way.Just as it is not necessary to share a language to communicate8 — this holds both for people... (shrink)