Few institutions are warier of copies than museums. Few fields of knowledge are more prone to denounce copies as fake than the heritage field. Few discourses are as concerned with authenticity, aura, originals and provenance as those concerning exhibiting and collecting. So why is it that these are institutions, fields and discourses where copies proliferate and copying techniques have thrived for hundreds of years? Museums as Cultures of Copies aims to make the copying practices of museums visible and to discuss, from a range of interrelated perspectives, precisely what function copies fulfil in the heritage field and in museums today. With contributions from Europe and Canada, the book interrogates the meaning of copies and presents copying as a fully integrated part of museum work. Including chapters on ethnographic mannequins, digitalized photos, death masks, museum documentation and mechanical models, contributors consider how copying as a cultural form changes according to time and place and how new forms of copying and copy technologies challenge and expand museum work today. Arguing that copying is at the basis of museum practice and that new technologies and practices have been taken up and developed in museums since their inception, the book presents both heritage work and copies in a new light. Museums as Cultures of Copies should be of great interest to academics, scholars and postgraduate students working in the fields of museum and heritage studies, as well as visual studies, cultural history and archaeology. It should also be essential reading for museum practitioners.

In the interwar period art revealed itself as part of the social and ideological order. The work of art became a point of intersection for the modern, unstable and ambiguous world. Works of art produced in these decades reflect a range of discourses on power and subjectivity. They contribute to the foundation of the post-war development of aesthetic pluralism and point out the socially conditioned framings of the Fine Arts. During the last decades, research in the field of interwar art has reworked and reconceptualised existing notions on the period. This book offers four new approaches which also contribute to reflections on methodological questions regarding the changes in the disciple of Art History since the early 1970s. The articles discuss topics such as Le Corbusier's connection with the French fascist movement, the position of women in the avant garde movement, Giorgio de Chirico's play with kitsch and avant garde practices, and the semiotics of the surrealist image.

These essays examine the transformation and expansion of the field of painting over the last decades in relation to the more general lines of development in contemporary culture and visuality. They pose questions like: How do paintings present themselves to us today; how are they 'framed' experientially, institutionally and culturally? In which way can paintings of today be said to reflect and reflect on the historical transformations of culture, visuality and image production and consumption? Is it possible to explain some of the changes and extensions of the field of painting by placing it in the wider context of cultural history or visual culture studies? The book is divided into five parts, with each of them pursuing a distinct line of inquiry: 1. How to situate painting in a wider cultural context; 2. How to rethink the question of the ontology of painting; 3. How to define 'painting' today by taking into consideration that the discipline has assimilated a wealth of new means of expression and materials; 4. How to address the role of gender in painting; 5. How to address the complex relationship between painting, art institutions and the art market.