Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World seeks to dissect and interrogate the nature of the present-day art field, which has experienced dramatic shifts in the past 50 years. In discussions of the canon of art history, the notion of 'inclusiveness', both at the level of rhetoric and as a desired practice is on the rise and gradually replacing talk of 'exclusion', which dominated critiques of the canon up until two decades ago. The art field has dramatically, if insufficiently, changed in the half-century since the first protests and critiques of the exclusion of 'others' from the art canon. With increased globalization and shifting geopolitics, the art field is expanding beyond its Euro-American focus, as is particularly evident in the large-scale international biennales now held all over the globe. Are canons and counter-canons still relevant? Can they be re-envisioned rather than merely revised? Following an introduction that discusses these issues, thirteen newly commissioned essays present case studies of consecration in the contemporary art field, and three commissioned discussions present diverse positions on issues of the canon and consecration processes today. This volume will be of interest to instructors and students of contemporary art, art history, and museum and curatorial studies.

Global Mobilities illustrates the significant engagement of museums and archives with populations that have experienced forced or willing migration: emigrants, exiles, refugees, asylum seekers, and others. The volume explores the role of public institutions in the politics of integration and cultural diversity, analyzing their efforts to further the inclusion of racial and ethnic minority populations. Emphasizing the importance of cross-cultural knowledge and exchange, global case studies examine the conflicts inherent in such efforts, considering key issues such as whether to focus on origins or destinations, as well as whether assimilation, integration, or an entirely new model would be the most effective approach. This collection provides an insight into diverse perspectives, not only of museum practitioners and scholars, but also the voices of artists, visitors, undocumented immigrants, and other members of source communities. Global Mobilities is an often provocative and thought-inspiring resource which offers a comprehensive overview of the field for those interested in understanding its complexities.

What does the transformation to a visitor-centered approach do for a museum? How are museums made relevant to a broad range of visitors of varying ages, identities, and social classes? Does appealing to a larger audience force museums to "dumb down" their work? What internal changes are required? Based on a multi-year, Kress Foundation-sponsored study of ten innovative American and European collections based museums recognized by their peers to be visitor centered, Peter Samis and Mimi Michaelson answer these key questions for the field. The book: * describes key institutions that have opened the doors to a wider range of visitors; * addresses the internal struggles to reorganize and democratize these institutions; * uses case studies, interviews of key personnel, Key Takeaways, and additional resources to help museum professionals implement a visitor-centered approach in collections-based institutions.

Commemoration: The American Association for State and Local History Guide serves as a handbook for historic site managers, heritage professionals, and all manner of public historians who contend daily with the ground-level complexities of commemoration. Its fourteen short essays are intended as tools for practitioners, students, and anyone else confronted with common problems in commemorative practice today. Of particular concern are strategies for expanding commemoration across the panoply of American identities, confronting tragedy and difficult pasts, and doing responsible work in the face of persistent economic and political turmoil. A special afterword explores the role of emotion in modern commemoration and what it suggests about possibilities for engaging new audiences.

In 1972, UNESCO put in place the World Heritage Convention, a highly successful international treaty that influences heritage activity in virtually every country in the world. Focusing on the Convention's creation and early implementation, this book examines the World Heritage system and its global impact through diverse prisms, including its normative frameworks, constituent bodies, programme activities, personalities and key issues. The authors concentrate on the period between 1972 and 2000 because implementation of the World Heritage Convention during these years sets the stage for future activity and provides a foil for understanding the subsequent evolution in the decade that follows. This innovative book project seeks out the voices of the pioneers - some 40 key players who participated in the creation and early implementation of the Convention - and combines these insightful interviews with original research drawn from a broad range of both published and archival sources. The World Heritage Convention has been significantly influenced by 40 years of history. Although the text of the Convention remains unchanged, the way it has been implemented reflects global trends as well as evolving perceptions of the nature of heritage itself and approaches to conservation. Some are sounding the alarm, claiming that the system is imploding under its own weight. Others believe that the Convention is being compromised by geopolitical considerations and rivalries. This book stimulates reflection on the meaning of the Convention in the twenty-first century.

Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum offers the first dedicated and comprehensive study of Vasari's original contributions to the making of museums, addressing the subject from the full range of aspects - collecting, installation, conceptual-historical - in which his influence is strongly felt. Uniting specialists of Giorgio Vasari with scholars of historical museology, this collection of essays presents a cross-disciplinary overview of Vasari's approaches to the collecting and display of art, artifacts and memorabilia. Although the main focus of the book is on the mid-late 16th century, contributors also bring to light that Vasari's museology enjoyed a substantial afterlife well into the modern museum era. This volume is a fundamental addition to the museum studies literature and a welcome enhancement to the scholarly industry on Giorgio Vasari.

The first volume in two centuries on Alexandre Lenoir's Museum of French Monuments in Paris, this study presents a comprehensive picture of a seminal project of French Revolutionary cultural policy, one crucial to the development of the modern museum institution. The book offers a new critical perspective of the Museum's importance and continuing relevance to the history of material culture and collecting, through juxtaposition with its main opponent, the respected connoisseur and theorist Quatremere de Quincy. This innovative approach highlights the cultural and intellectual context of the debate, situating it in the dilemmas of emerging modernity, the idea of nationhood, and changing attitudes to art and its histories. Open only from 1795 to 1816, the Museum of French Monuments was at once popular and controversial. The salvaged sculptures and architectural fragments that formed its collection presented the first chronological panorama of French art, which drew the public; it also drew the ire of critics, who saw the Museum as an offense against the monuments' artistic integrity. Underlying this localized conflict were emerging ideas about the nature of art and its relationship to history, which still define our understanding of notions of heritage, monument, and the museum.

This book explores how museums, galleries and heritage sites of all kinds, through the narratives they construct and publicly present, can shape the moral and political climate within which human rights are experienced. Through a series of richly-drawn cases, which focus on gender diversity and same-sex love and desire, Richard Sandell examines the ways in which museums are implicated in the ongoing struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex human rights. Museums, Moralities and Human Rights brings together for the first time the perspectives not only of those who work in, govern, fund and visit museums but also those of rights activists and campaigners who, at key moments in their struggle, have turned their attention to museums to advance their cause. Offering new insights into how human rights are continually fought for, realised and refused, this volume makes the case for museums of all kinds to take up an active, mindful and purposive engagement with contemporary human rights concerns.

A stable and well-managed endowment can be the key to a museum's financial strength. But how do you establish and maintain an endowment that is right for your organization and its future? With easily accessible language and case studies of real museums to illuminate major points, Endowment Essentials for Museums provides guidance on the establishment and oversight of endowments, including how to: Plan for and build an endowment fund Create opportunities to grow the endowment through fundraising and investment management Incorporate endowment management into institutional planning Foster transparency and shared knowledge about endowments between staff, trustees, and community members Evaluate and modify endowments accurately and according to best practices. Attending to endowment management at all stages, incorporating references from across the nonprofit spectrum, and designed to resonate with readers from a variety of backgrounds, Endowment Essentials for Museums invites forward-thinking museum professionals, trustees, and volunteers to enhance their knowledge about the endowments and the integral role it plays in the health of your museum.

The Industrial Heritage is the first integrated approach to the assessment, conservation, interpretation, financing and management of the complex heritage of industrial cultures. It breaks new ground, as the authors (both active workers in the field) suggest that concepts of heritage defined to deal with pre-industrial cultures must be modified to deal with the very different demands presented by industrial objects and the societies which produced them. The essence of this book is practicality, offering examples of the real issues which confront those concerned with preserving and managing the industrial heritage.

Nature conservation planning tends to be driven by models based on Western norms and science, but these may not represent the cultural, philosophical and religious contexts of much of Asia. This book provides a new perspective on the topic of sacred natural sites and cultural heritage by linking Asian cultures, religions and worldviews with contemporary conservation practices and approaches. The chapters focus on the modern significance of sacred natural sites in Asian protected areas with reference, where appropriate, to an Asian philosophy of protected areas. Drawn from over 20 different countries, the book covers examples of sacred natural sites from all of IUCN's protected area categories and governance types. The authors demonstrate the challenges faced to maintain culture and support spiritual and religious governance and management structures in the face of strong modernisation across Asia. The book shows how sacred natural sites contribute to defining new, more sustainable and more equitable forms of protected areas and conservation that reflect the worldviews and beliefs of their respective cultures and religions. The book contributes to a paradigm-shift in conservation and protected areas as it advocates for greater recognition of culture and spirituality through the adoption of biocultural conservation approaches.

Forward planning is esential for most organizations, but especially so for museums and heritage bodies, with responsibilities stretching forward to infinity. Forwrd Planning provides a complete basic guide, from the principles on which planning is founded, through drawing up the plan itself, implementation and monitoring, through to the wider potentials that good planning permits. All the contibutors to the book speak from wide practical experience. A full bibliography and suggestions for further reading are included.

Suzanne Keene's pioneering book shows how museums and other cultural organizations fit into the new world of information and electronic communications and, most importantly, how they can take advantage of what it has to offer. By using new technology museums can build knowledge bases around information about collections. A collection object can be the central link for information about past and present, places, people and concepts, technologies, ways of working and evidence of the natural world. 'Digital Collections' explains how this vision can be realized. Sound, video and animations can be digitized and developed as a central resource that can be drawn on for many varied access routes: via the World Wide Web; CD ROMs; through on-gallery screens, and other future products still in development. These technological capabilities raise many compelling issues that need to be understood in order to successfully develop information collections. In this book Suzanne Keene reviews these issues clearly and comprehensively. Suzanne Keene is a senior manager of museum collections and information at the Science Museum, London. She led the UK LASSI project to select a collections information system for UK museums. This, with her experience in directing information technology and multimedia projects, means that she is accustomed to translating the highly technical concepts of information technology into high level issues for senior and strategic management.

Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change explores the way museums tackle the broad global issue of climate change. It explores the power of real objects and collections to stir hearts and minds, to engage communities affected by change. Museums work through exhibitions, events, and specific collection projects to reach different communities in different ways. The book emphasises the moral responsibilities of museums to address climate change, not just by communicating science but also by enabling people already affected by changes to find their own ways of living with global warming. There are museums of natural history, of art and of social history. The focus of this book is the museum communities, like those in the Pacific, who have to find new ways to express their culture in a new place. The book considers how collections in museums might help future generations stay in touch with their culture, even where they have left their place. It asks what should the people of the present be collecting for museums in a climate-changed future? The book is rich with practical museum experience and detailed projects, as well as critical and philosophical analyses about where a museum can intervene to speak to this great conundrum of our times. Curating the Future is essential reading for all those working in museums and grappling with how to talk about climate change. It also has academic applications in courses of museology and museum studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, digital humanities, design, anthropology, and environmental humanities.

The User Perspective on Twenty-First Century Art Museums explains contemporary museums from the whole gamut of user experiences, whether users are preserving art, creating an exhibit, visiting, or part of institutions that use the architecture for branding. Fourteen museums from the United States, Europe, China, and Australia represent new construction, repurposed buildings, and additions, offering examples for most museum design situations. Each is examined using interviews with key stakeholders, photographs, and analyses of press coverage to identify lessons from the main user groups. User groups vary from project to project depending on conditions and context, so each of the four parts of the book features a summary of the users and issues in that section for quick reference. The book concludes with a practical, straightforward lessons-learned summary and a critical assessment of twenty-first-century museum architecture, programming, and expectations to help you embark on a new building design. Architects, architecture students, museum professionals, and aficionados of museum design will all find helpful insights in these lessons and critiques.

The User Perspective on Twenty-First Century Art Museums explains contemporary museums from the whole gamut of user experiences, whether users are preserving art, creating an exhibit, visiting, or part of institutions that use the architecture for branding. Fourteen museums from the United States, Europe, China, and Australia represent new construction, repurposed buildings, and additions, offering examples for most museum design situations. Each is examined using interviews with key stakeholders, photographs, and analyses of press coverage to identify lessons from the main user groups. User groups vary from project to project depending on conditions and context, so each of the four parts of the book features a summary of the users and issues in that section for quick reference. The book concludes with a practical, straightforward lessons-learned summary and a critical assessment of twenty-first-century museum architecture, programming, and expectations to help you embark on a new building design. Architects, architecture students, museum professionals, and aficionados of museum design will all find helpful insights in these lessons and critiques.

The 1970s saw the emergence and subsequent proliferation across the Arabian Peninsula of 'national museums', institutions aimed at creating social cohesion and affiliation to the state within a disparate population. Representing the Nation examines the wide-ranging use of exhibitionary forms of national identity projection via consideration of their motivations, implications (current and future), possible historical backgrounds, official and unofficial meanings, and meanings for both the user/visitor and the multiple creators. The book responds to, due to the importance placed on tradition, heritage and national identity across all the states of the Peninsula, and the growth of re-imagined and new museums, the need for far greater discussion and research in these areas.

This book sets itself apart from much of the burgeoning literature on war commemoration within human geography and the social sciences more generally by analysing how the Second World War (1941-45) is remembered within Singapore, unique for its potential to shed light on the manifold politics associated with the commemoration of wars not only within an Asian, but also a multiracial and multi-religious postcolonial context. By adopting a historical materialist approach, it traces the genealogy of war commemoration in Singapore, from the initial disavowal of the war by the postcolonial government since independence in 1965 to it being embraced as part of national historiography in the early 1990s apparent in the emergence since then of various memoryscapes dedicated to the event. Also, through a critical analysis of a wide selection of these memoryscapes, the book interrogates how memories of the war have been spatially and discursively appropriated today by state (and non-state) agencies as a means of achieving multiple objectives, including (but not limited to) commemoration, tourism, mourning and nation-building. And finally, the book examines the perspectives of those who engage with or use these memoryscapes in order to reveal their contested nature as fractured by social divisions of race, gender, ideology and nationality. The substantive book chapters will be based on archival and empirical data drawn from case studies in Singapore themed along different conceptual lenses including ethnicity; gender; postcoloniality, tourism and postmodernity; personal mourning; transnational remembrances and politics; and the preservation of original sites, stories and artefacts of war. Collectively, they speak to and work towards shedding insights to the one overarching question: 'How is the Second World War commemorated in postcolonial Singapore and what are some of the issues, politics and contestations which have accompanied these efforts to presence the war today, particularly as they are spatially and materially played out via different types of memoryscapes?' The book also distinguishes itself from previous works written on war commemoration in Singapore, mainly by social and military historians, particularly through its adoption of a geographical agenda that gives attention to issues of politics of space as it relates to remembrance and representations of memory.

This engaging volume reveals how politics permeates all facets of museum practice, particularly in regions of political conflict. In these settings, museums can be extraordinarily influential for shaping identity and collective memory and for peace building. Using key Cypriote archaeological, historical, ethnographic, and art museums as examples, this book: provides a multifaceted and deeper understanding of how politics, conflict, national agendas, and individual initiatives can shape museums and their narratives; discusses how these forces contribute to the creation of, and conflict over, national, community and personal identities; examines how museums use inclusion and exclusion in their collections, exhibitions, objects and interpretive material as a way of selectively constructing collective memories. This book will be an important resource for museum professionals, as well as scholars interested in the effects of politics on museums and interpretations of the past.

Radiography can be an invaluable tool for the study of a diverse array of cultural materials including metals, ceramics, paper, paintings and human and animal remains. In this book, experts in the field bring to life their experiences with the different materials, describing the techniques that can be employed to discover the stories behind the objects. This second edition, available in paperback for the first time, includes new case studies and images, as well as whole new sections on digital imaging, quality control and animal mummies.

A nation's heritage is one of the most potent forces for generating tourism: the Tower of London is the greatest 'visitor attraction' in Britain. But it is pushed into insignificance by comparison with the visitors travelling to Disneyland, Epcot and the other entertainment complexes in the USA; and it will be dwarfed by Euro-Disneyland east of Paris. So how should heritage attractions respond: should they find their own specific audiences and resources? This book, written by a leading hertage specialist, is essential reading for all those concerned both with heritage and leisure managment. International in scope, it examines successfgul examples of heritage management for tourism, and equally some failures. It aims to lay some useful ground rules which should underpin all heritage developments designed to attract tourism on a major scale.

This book challenges the museum enterprise in China as a state monopoly and considers it as a new cultural agency that has emerged in the early twenty-first century. Following a constructive and multi-perspectival approach, it discusses the roles of political and cultural-economic agents, museum intermediaries, and museum publics in the interlinked processes of regulation, cultural production and consumption, and the issues of identity and representation faced by the art museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. It broadly traces the art museum from its origin as a tool of nationalism and adoption as a vehicle of modernization in both nationalist and early communist periods, until its role in the present, as it reflects the contested and alternative representations, diverse publics, and fissured identities of the post-economic reform period of China.

Moving images have become an increasingly common feature in a wide range of museums, which are frequently populated with screens and audio-visual projections. But when did films start to be displayed in museum galleries? And what are the issues at stake when showing moving images in exhibition spaces? With an innovative and strongly interdisciplinary theoretical framework, this book offers an extensive investigation of the use of audio-visuals in exhibition design. Highlighting the continuities and fractures between different periods, contexts and practices, Elisa Mandelli shows the deep influence of audio-visuals on the configuration of the exhibition space, as well as on the relationship between museums and their visitors.

Food is such a friendly topic that it's often thought of as a "hook" for engaging visitors - a familiar way into other topics, or a sensory element to round out a living history interpretation. But it's more than just a hook - it's a topic all its own, with its own history and its own uncertain future, deserving of a central place in historic interpretation. With audiences more interested in food than ever before, and new research in food studies bringing interdisciplinary approaches to this complicated but compelling subject, museums and historic sites have an opportunity to draw new audiences and infuse new meaning into their food presentations. You'll find: *A comprehensive, thematic framework of key concepts that will help you contextualize food history interpretations; *A concise, evaluative review of the historiography of food interpretation; *Case studies featuring the expression of these themes in the real world of museum interpretation; and *Best practices for interpreting food. Interpreting Food at Museums and Historic Sites offers a framework for understanding the big ideas in food history, suggesting best practices for linking objects, exhibits and demonstrations with the larger story of change in food production and consumption over the past two centuries - a story in which your visitors can see themselves, and explore their own relationships to food. This book can help you develop food interpretation with depth and significance, making relevant connections to contemporary issues and visitor interests.

Museums have moved from a product to a marketing focus within the last ten years. This has entailed a painful reorientation of approaches to understanding visitors as 'customers'; new ways of fundraising and sponsorship as government funding decreases; and grappling with using the internet for marketing. This book brings the latest in marketing thinking to bear on the museum sector taking into account both the commercial issues and social mission it involves. Carefully structured to be highly accessible the book offers: * A contemporary and relevant and global approach to museum marketing written by authors in Britain, Australia, the United States, and Asia * An approach that reflects the particular challenges museums of varying sizes face when seeking to market an experience to a diverse set of stakeholders: audience; funders; sponsors and government. * A particular focus on museum marketing in the 'Information Age' * Major case studies at the beginning and end of each section of the book, and smaller case studies within chapters The hugely experienced author team, includes both leading academics and practitioners to ensure the book has broad appeal and is both relevant, innovative and progressive in approach. It will be essential reading for students in museum studies, non-profit marketing, and arts management and marketing. It will also be equally relevant for professionals working in and managing museums and galleries, heritage attractions and ministries of arts.