scholarly journals The Dangerous Museum. Participatory practices and controversy in museums today

1970 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Britta Tøndborg
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Audience Participation ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
Museum Professionals ◽  
Related Development ◽  
Democratic Change ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Museum Exhibitions ◽  
Museum Practice

Whereas museums shunned controversy in the past, this article argues that as museums embrace the new trend of audience participation some have also opted to introduce “hot topics” into museum exhibitions. Museum professionals who have adopted this particular form of museum practice predict that it has the potential to reform museums as we know them, and to turn museums into active agents for democratic change in society. In a bid to understand and scrutinize the implications of this development in museums, the article consults critiques raised by art critics writing about a related development in contemporary art, i.e. relational and participatory art forms. 

Introduction: Transnational/Transartistic Journeys

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalind Silvester ◽  
Margaret Topping
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Traditional Area ◽  
Epistemological Shifts

In the past two decades we have witnessed a series of epistemological shifts, springing from traditional area studies and departing from nationally bounded fields. These moves seem to dislocate and problematize categories of identity by focusing on translocality and by calling attention to processes of displacement, dispersion, objects and ideas, and to the new cultural and imaginary territories that these mobilizations effect. Such formulations, while historically situated, illuminate flows and favour transformation, as opposed to producing ontological crystallisations. This issue will explore the view that the creation of new cultural phenomena may be achieved, in the richest of ways, through the mixing of genres and the crossing of media. It will seek to investigate how various contemporary art forms serve to express, envision, challenge and renegotiate Francophone identities that reach across cultures.

scholarly journals LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS GUITARS: PERSONA AND THE MATERIAL DISPLAYS OF POPULAR MUSIC MUSEUMS

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-74
Author(s):  
Charles Fairchild
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Past ◽  
Museum Exhibitions ◽  
Entire Complex ◽  
Museum Practice ◽  
Do So

The study of popular music museums has expanded greatly in the past decade or so. The numerous studies produced so far have largely focused on issues to do with tourism, heritage, and curatorship. Most analysis has attempted to gauge the effectiveness and degree of success of the various methods of constructing and displaying collections of sounds, objects, and ideas. One area that can be of interest in moving beyond these analyses of museum practice is to examine how larger ideologies of artistry and artists that pervade the celebrity personas so assiduously built around famous musicians are an important foundation for these museums’ displays. There are two reasons for the value of this approach. First, it should be clear that most exhibits in popular music museums are built to enhance, not contest already-existing images, historical narratives, and genre-defining attributes that surround well-known musicians. Therefore, it is not possible to understand these institutions without some sense of how they work with musician personas that necessarily precede any presentation in museum exhibitions. Second, we can see this dynamic in extraordinarily concise forms when we examine some of the ‘famous objects’ these museums display. We can often see an entire complex of received ideas about an artist encapsulated in just a few well-known objects they once possessed. From this I will suggest that the personas of famous musicians that appear in most popular music museums do so through varied amalgams of symbolic and material forms meant to stabilise or enhance already-existing ideas about canonically-validated ‘great’ artists.

scholarly journals Det arkeologiske museum. Momenter til en kritikk

1970 ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Bjørnar Olsen
Keyword(s):  
Critical Points ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Public Identity ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Museum Exhibitions ◽  
Museum Practice

The Archaeological Museums - Some Critical Points Archaeology's public identity is inextricably linked to museums and museum practice. The museum exhibitions constitute the main point of contact between archaeology and the public. In official scholarly and political discourse the social role of the museum is claimed to be that of the protection and conservation of prehistoric material and the presentation of knowledge about the past to the public. Furthermore, it is often maintained that the museum should provide a connection with history and a stability and thus impart to society a sense of its roots and its identity. 

scholarly journals I, etcetera

October ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 166 ◽  
pp. 45-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Kitnick
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
First Person ◽  
Personal Essay ◽  
The Past

Over the past few years there has been a marked use of the first-person singular in a broad range of cultural practices, including contemporary art, literature, and criticism. Although it goes by any number of names—autobiography, autofiction, confession, epistle, memoir, personal essay—which each have a specific history and structure, its increased use in our current moment suggests a common impulse and points to a novel conception of the author that is represented in the work of Moyra Davey, Chris Kraus, and Maggie Nelson.

scholarly journals Military museums in Poland – between the past and the future

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-39
Author(s):  
Dagmara Chylińska ◽  
Łukasz Musiaka
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Cultural Tourism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Museum Practice ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Special Mirror

Museums are a constantly developing segment of cultural tourism. Poland is in line with current trends in museums, expanding its offer and adapting it to the requirements of the world of contemporary image culture and multisensory experiences, which is increasingly dominated by technology. The authors of the paper undertook to recognise the specificity of military museums, by conducting a survey of approximately a third of all such institutions in Poland. Due to the subject-matter of their exhibitions, military museums create a broad field of research both in terms of aesthetics and museum practice, as well as the issues of shaping and maintaining collective memory and the identity of the nation. They form a special mirror in which the country’s ideas and aspirations are reflected more often than any real characteristics. In reference to contemporary trends in museums, the article aims to place Polish military museums between locality and universality, education and entertainment, stability and dynamism, knowledge and experience. The results obtained allowed the authors to distinguish three groups of military museums in Poland, as well as indicate conditions conducive to the further development of such attractions in the country.

scholarly journals The State of Play: An Exploration of Games and Their Value in  museum Exhibitions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Anton Berndt
Keyword(s):  
Research Question ◽  
Museum Studies ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Successful Implementation ◽  
Central Research ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Museum Exhibitions ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Museum Practice ◽  
New Museology

<p>In the field of museum studies there has been very little consideration of games and their application to exhibiting practice. This represents a significant gap in the theory on current museum practice given the frequency of games in exhibitions and the scale of the commercial games industry in contemporary culture. This study begins to redress this issue by exploring how a significant and influential museum operating within the paradigm of the new museology views the role of games in its exhibitions. The thesis considers the central research question: what do practitioners currently think about games in museum exhibitions and how could museum games be improved. Following an interpretivist methodology the study seeks to answer this question through a case study of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Seven practitioners affiliated with this museum were interviewed about their understanding of games and their application in a museum context. The research findings illuminate the current understanding of games held by these practitioners and factors that inhibit the successful implementation of games at Te Papa. It was found that the practitioners’ opinions had not been influenced by the available theoretical literature on games. It was also found that practitioners thought games in exhibitions at the museum have not been particularly successful in achieving either the goals of exhibitions or the potential that games offer. It is concluded that the introduction of theories on play and on games into museum theory and practice has potential for significant advances in this area of exhibition development. In contemporary museums there is a shift away from presenting absolute, positivist understandings of knowledge toward the subjective, construction of meaning. Museums are also increasingly required to maintain economic efficacy while offering a valuable service to the populace. This thesis responds to this situation by proposing that a greater knowledge and utilisation of games in exhibitions offers a valuable approach in negotiating these two trends. By presenting an understanding of games, their potential value for museums and perspectives on what currently inhibits their successful application this research offers the field of museum studies a basis from which to develop knowledge of this under-theorised aspect of museum practice.</p>

Reflecții asupra conceptului de artă obiectivă în contextul artei contemporane

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-184
Author(s):  
Carmen Belean
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Arbitrary Element ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The Universe

"Reflections on the concept of objective art in the context of contemporary art. Objective art communicates about the human being and his/her place in the universe, about the cosmic laws and the role they play in human life and provide clues as to how man can relate to them. From literary sources attesting to the idea that art in its origin had the role of transmitting knowledge to future generations, we deduce that in ancient times all art forms could be read like a book, and those who knew how to read, fully understood the meaning of the knowledge that was incorporated in these art forms. Nevertheless, there are two forms of art, one very different from the other: objective art and subjective art. Everything that we call art today is subjective art. Objective art is the authentic work resulted from the deliberate, premeditated efforts of a conscious artist. In the act of his creation, the artist avoids or eliminates any subjective or arbitrary element and the impression that such a work evokes in others is always defined. Keywords: objective art, the art of antiquity, contemporary art "

Veronicas and Artists

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Religious Images ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Chapter One deals with several central issues with regard to understanding the role of religious motifs in contemporary art. Besides being a repetition of imagery from the past, religious motifs embedded in contemporary artworks become a means to problematise not only the way different periods in the history of art are delimited, but larger and seemingly more rigid distinctions as those between art and non-art images. Early religious images differ significantly from art images. The two types are regulated according to different sets of rules related to the conditions of their production, display, appreciation and the way images are invested with the status of being true or authentic instances of art or sacred images. Chapter One provides a discussion of the important motif of the image not made by an artist’s hand, or acheiropoietos, and its survival and transformation, including its traces in contemporary image-making practices. All images are the result of human making; they are fictions. The way the conditions of these fictions are negotiated, or the way the role of the maker is brought to visibility, or concealed, is a defining feature of the specific regime of representation. While the cult image concealed its maker in order to maintain its public significance, and the later art image celebrated the artist as a re-inventor of the old image, contemporary artists cite religious images in order to reflect on the very procedures that produce the public significance and status of images.

Theorizing Adaptation in the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-138
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Recording Device ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Copyright Laws ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Literature And Film

Chapter 3 discusses how, just as new copyright laws were legitimizing intermedial adaptations, modernist theories drastically diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation with their rejection of the past and celebration of the new. Modernism shattered adaptation into allusions: studying allusions as adaptations would indubitably help to restore the theoretical fortunes of adaptation under modernism. Modernism’s hostility to mass culture was often aimed at adaptation: even theorists valorizing other popular cultural forms opposed it. Requiring film to dissociate from other art forms in order to emerge as an art in its own right, rather than as a craft or a recording device for other arts, medium specificity theory undermined adaptation in literature-and-film studies. Affecting all kinds of adaptation, the formalist turn diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation by rejecting the cultural theories that had valorized adaptation in prior centuries. Joined to medium specificity theories and structuralist semiotics, intermedial adaptation became not only aesthetically undesirable but also theoretically impossible under theories that content cannot separate from form to appear in another medium. With the advent of the theoretical turn in the humanities, adaptation became a battleground upon which theoretical wars were fought, battles that, paradoxically, foregrounded it. By the 1990s, adaptation was becoming an established, if divided, diasporic field, engaging a panoply of theories.

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