1st Edition

The Contemporary Museum Shaping Museums for the Global Now

Edited By Simon Knell Copyright 2019
258 Pages
by Routledge

258 Pages
by Routledge

258 Pages
by Routledge

The Contemporary Museum issues a challenge to those who view the museum as an artefact of history, constrained in its outlook as much by professional, institutional and disciplinary creed, as by the collections it accumulated in the distant past. Denying that the museum can locate its purpose in the pursuit of tradition or in idealistic speculation about the future, the book asserts that this... Read more

Contents

List of Figures

List of Plates

Notes on Contributors

Preface

 

Introduction

Museums for the global contemporary

PART I: A WORLD OF EQUALS

1

Modernisms

Curating art’s past in the global present

Simon Knell

2

Indigenisation

Reconceptualising museology

Conal McCarthy

3

Islam

Islamic art, the Islamic world – and museums

John Reeve

4

Xenophobia

Museums, refugees and fear of the other

Andrea Witcomb

5

Diplomacy

Museums and international exhibitions

Da Kong

PART II: PRESENT PASTS

6

Transience

Curating ephemeral art

Stacy Boldrick

7

Performances

Contemporary encounters in historic spaces

Romina Delia

8

Transhistoricism

Using the past to critique the present

Annette Loeseke

9

Pasts

Authoring national histories in the contemporary city

Cintia Velázquez Marroni

PART III: WHO WE ARE

10

Disability

Museums and our understandings of difference

Richard Sandell

11

Contact

Framing prostitution in a city museum

Annemarie de Wildt

12

Small wins

Tactics for the contemporary museum

Viviane Gosselin

13

Anxiety

Unease in the museum

Jennifer Walklate

Biography

Simon Knell is Professor of Museum Studies and the senior academic in School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. He has also acted as Head of Department and Dean of Arts.

‘The follow-up volume to Museum Revolutions, The Contemporary Museum recognises the “present” as increasingly defined by the ubiquity of disruption and dissent, and explores the escalation of feelings of anxiety and outrage that arise from a rapidly changing world. The book’s standout achievement is its geographically expansive set of case studies, which richly demonstrate the ongoing humanism and humanity of museums, as sites of affective, albeit often contested, meaning and personal and collective agency. Its analysis of “the present” as it exists in dialogue with the past and future as well as with the broad components of what is occurring globally at any given “now”, will make it essential reading for museum studies scholars for many years to come.’
Kylie Message, The Australian National University