Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display [first edition]

Throwing open to debate the practices of museums, galleries, and festivals, Exhibiting Cultures probes the politically charged relationships among aesthetics, contexts and implicit assumptions that govern how cultural differences and art objects are displayed. In the United States, especially given the heightened worldwide interest in multicultural and intercultural issues, the inherent contestability of museum exhibitions is bound to open the choices made in those exhibitions to heated debate. Groups attempting to establish and maintain a sense of community and to assert their social, political, and economic claims in the larger world challenge the right of established institutions to control the representations of their cultures. Inevitably, even those curators and museum directors who respond to these concerns find themselves in difficult territory, fearful of the passion of the debates and often insufficiently aware of the unconscious assumptions that underlie their own exhibitions. This volume brings together museum directors and curators, art historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and historians to examine how diverse settings have appealed to audiences and represented the intentions and cultures of makers of objects. The essays address such major issues in the politics of culture as how the learned experience of everyday life is used to make exhibitions comprehensible, what happens to minority and exotic arts when they are assimilated into the hegemonic context of the great museums, and why ethnographic museums have been neglected in the age of museum expansion. Based on a landmark conference sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation (USA), the book contains twenty-seven essays and is arranged into five sections: Culture and Representation; Art Museums, National Identity and the Status of Minority Cultures; Museum Practices; Festivals; and Other Cultures in Museum Perspectives.