Imaginary Museums


Book Description

"A collection of flash fiction that feels seemingly arbitrary with an ache of human longing for connection peppered in. . . . These bizarre but beautiful stories transport you elsewhere with no intention of bringing you back." —Ashleah Gonzales, W magazine In this collection of compact fictions, Nicolette Polek transports us to a gently unsettling realm inhabited by disheveled landlords, a fugitive bride, a seamstress who forgets what people look like, and two rival falconers from neighboring towns. They find themselves in bathhouses, sports bars, grocery stores, and forests in search of exits, pink tennis balls, licorice, and independence. Yet all of her beautifully strange characters are possessed by a familiar and human longing for connection: to their homes, families, God, and themselves.




Imagined Museums


Book Description

Imagined Museumsexamines the intertwined politics surrounding art and modernization in Morocco from 1912 to the present by considering the structure of the museum not only as a modern institution but also as a national monument to modernity, asking what happens when museum monuments start to crumble. In an analysis of museum history, exhibition policy, the lack of national museum space for modern art, and postmodern exhibit spaces in Morocco, Katarzyna Pieprzak focuses on the role that art plays in the social fabric of a modernizing Morocco. She argues that the decay of colonial and national institutions of culture has invited the rethinking of the museum and generated countermuseums to stage new narratives of art, memory, and modernity. Through these spaces she explores a range of questions: How is modernity imagined locally? How are claims to modernity articulated? How is Moroccan modernity challenged globally? In this first cultural history of modern Moroccan art and its museums, Pieprzak goes beyond the investigation of national institutions to treat the history and evolution of multiple museums—from official state and corporate exhibition spaces to informal, popular, street-level art and performance spaces—as cultural architectures that both enshrine the past and look to the future.




The Stories of the Mona Lisa


Book Description

A history of modern painting, presented through the story of the Mona Lisa, features an artist who serves as a museum tour guide introducing famous movements while sharing creative images of how the Mona Lisa may have appeared if painted by other master artists.




The Imaginary Museum: A Personal Tour of Contemporary Art featuring ghosts, nudity and disagreements


Book Description

Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary museum. Let him walk you through a building constructed from memory and filled with a series of bewildering art works, while he delivers a guide comprised of personal experience, professional expertise and sympathy.




Museum Making


Book Description

Over recent decades, many museums, galleries and historic sites around the world have enjoyed an unprecedented level of large-scale investment in their capital infrastructure, in building refurbishments and new gallery displays. This period has also seen the creation of countless new purpose-built museums and galleries, suggesting a fundamental re-evaluation of the processes of designing and shaping of museums. Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions examines this re-making by exploring the inherently spatial character of narrative in the museum and its potential to connect on the deepest levels with human perception and imagination. Through this uniting theme, the chapters explore the power of narratives as structured experiences unfolding in space and time as well as the use of theatre, film and other technologies of storytelling by contemporary museum makers to generate meaningful and, it is argued here, highly effective and affective museum spaces. Contributions by an internationally diverse group of museum and heritage professionals, exhibition designers, architects and artists with academics from a range of disciplines including museum studies, theatre studies, architecture, design and history cut across traditional boundaries including the historical and the contemporary and together explore the various roles and functions of narrative as a mechanism for the creation of engaging and meaningful interpretive environments.




The Historic Imaginary


Book Description

Focusing on both ritual and mass-visual representations of history in 1920s and 1930s Italy, The Historic Imaginary unveils how Italian Fascism sought to institutionalize a modernist culture of history. The study takes a new historicist and microhistorical approach to cultural-intellectual history, integrating theoretical tools of analysis acquired from visual-cultural studies, art history, linguistics, and reception theory in a sophisticated examination of visual modes of historical representation - from commemorations to monuments to exhibitions and mass-media - spanning the entire period of the Italian-fascist regime. Claudio Fogu argues that the fascist historic imaginary was intellectually rooted in the actualist philosophy of history elaborated by Giovanni Gentile, culturally grounded in Latin-Catholic rhetorical codes, and aimed at overcoming both Marxist and liberal conceptions of the relationship between historical agency, representation, and consciousness. The book further proposes that this modernist vision of history was a core element of fascist ideology, encapsulated by the famous Mussolinian motto that "fascism makes history rather than writing it," and that its institutionalization constituted a key point of intersection between the fascist aesthetization and sacralization of politics. The author finally claims that his study of fascist historic culture opens the way to an understanding and re-evaluation of the historical relationship between the modernist critique of historical consciousness and the rise of post-modernist forms of temporality.




The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works : An Essay in the Philosophy of Music


Book Description

What is the difference between a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the symphony itself? What does it mean for musicians to be faithful to the works they perform? To answer such questions, Lydia Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. Finding Anglo-American philosophy inadequate for the task, she shows that a historical perspective is indispensable to a full understanding of musical ontology. Goehr examines the concepts and assumptions behind the practice of classical music in the nineteenth century and demonstrates how different they were from those of previous centuries. She rejects the finding that the concept of a musical work emerged in the sixteenth century, placing its emergence instead around 1800. She describes how the concept of a work then came to define the norms, expectations, and behaviour that we now associate with classical music. Out of the historical thesis Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates among conductors, early music performers, and avant-gardists. - ;Introduction; I. The Analytic Approach: Status and identity: Analytical positions I; Analytical positions II; Critique and transition; II. The Historical Approach: Normativity and Practice: The central claim; Musical meaning I; Musical meaning II; Musical production I; Musical production II; Werktreue: Confirmation and challenge -




The Museum


Book Description

DIVÂ /div When I see a work of art, something happens in my heart! As a little girl tours and twirls through the halls of the art museum, she finds herself on an exciting adventure. Each piece of art evokes something new inside of her: silliness, curiosity, joy, and ultimately inspiration. When confronted with an empty white canvas, she is energized to create and express herself—which is the greatest feeling of all. With exuberant illustrations by Peter H. Reynolds, The Museum playfully captures the many emotions experienced through the power of art, and each child’s unique creative process. UPraise for The Museum/u "Verde and Reynolds deliver a simple premise with a charming payoff... this “twirly-whirly†? homage to a museum is, on balance, a sweet-natured and handsome celebration." —Kirkus Reviews "Debut author Verde makes an engaging case for understanding art as an experience rather than an object." —Publishers Weekly "The rhymed text captures the excitement of a being sparked by art.†? —Booklist "Communicates a fresh, playful, childlike perspective on art and normalizes childlike responses to it. The idea that posing, laughing, and curious questions are all appropriate museum behavior may be a new one for both children and parents, and knowing this is sure to make for more enjoyable museum visits." —School Library Journal "For parents who have trouble communicating the excitement of art to their children, The Museum can serve as the starting point for a conversation. The book is also a wonderful reminder of visual art’s power to encourage and empower self-expression. Children and adults will finish this book excited about their next art experience, and perhaps tempted to dance through the halls of a museum in the near future." —Bookpage "This playful picture book pays tribute to the joyous effect art can have on the viewer." —Shelf-Awareness




Micromuseology


Book Description

How would our understanding of museums change if we used the Vintage Wireless Museum or the Museum of Witchcraft as examples – rather than the British Museum or the Louvre? Although there are thousands of small, independent, single-subject museums in the UK, Europe and North America, the field of museum studies remains focused almost exclusively on major institutions. In this ground-breaking new book, Fiona Candlin reveals how micromuseums challenge preconceived ideas about what museums are and how they operate. Based on extensive fieldwork and analysis of more than fifty micromuseums, she shows how they offer dramatically different models of curation, interpretation and visitor experience, and how their analysis generates new perspectives on subjects such as display, objects, collections, architecture, and the public sphere. The first-ever book dedicated to the subject, Micromuseology provides a platform for radically rethinking key debates within museum studies. Destined to transform the field, it is essential reading for students and researchers in museum studies, anthropology, material culture studies, and visual culture.




Book of Imaginary Media


Book Description

Have you ever wondered if one day Windows 2028 might just know what you're thinking and type it? In this collection of essays, a selection of today's top media and sci-fi theorists weigh in. The Book of Imaginary Media explores the persistent idea that technology may one day succeed where no human has, not only in space or in nature, but also in interpersonal communication. Building on insights from media archeology, Siegfried Zielinski, Bruce Sterling, Erkki Huhtamo and Timothy Druckrey spin a web of associations between the fantasy machines of Athanasius Kircher, the mania of stereoscopy and "dead" media. Edwin Carels and Zoe Beloff descend into the cinematographic caverns of spiritualism and the iconography of death, and renowned cartoonists including Ben Katchor depict their own visionary media fantasies. On the enclosd DVD, artist Peter Blegvad provides hilarious commentary in a son et lumière version of his On Imaginary Media.