Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age PDF Download

Author: Haidy Geismar
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787352838
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.

Author: Brenda Cowan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042988575X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Museum Objects, Health and Healing provides an innovative and interdisciplinary study of the relationship between objects, health and healing. Shedding light on the primacy of the human need for relationships with objects, the book explores what kind of implications these relationships might have on the exhibition experience. Merging museum and object studies, as well as psychotherapy and the psychology of well-being, the authors present a new theory entitled Psychotherapeutic Object Dynamics, which provides a cross- disciplinary study of the relationship between objects, health and well-being. Drawing on primary research in museums, psychotherapeutic settings and professional practice throughout the US, Canada, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the UK, the book provides an overview of the theory’s origins, the breadth of its practical applications on a global level, and a framework for further understanding the potency of objects in exhibitions and daily life. Museum Objects, Health and Healing will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in museum studies, material culture, mental health, psychotherapy, art therapies and anthropology. It should also be valuable reading for a wide range of practitioners, including curators, exhibition designers, psychologists, and psychotherapists.

Author: Jeffrey Thomson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781948579254
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
"Titled after a small gallery of the same name found in Rome, the poems are devoted to meditations on religious relics and works of art. They explore the narrative power these objects carry-the way we imbue totemic figures with both meaning and story, and the potential they have to define the world. From holy statues, to cherished words, to historical monuments, Thompson seeks to vitalize the inanimate"--

Author: Catherine A. Nichols
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800730535
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
As an historical account of the exchange of “duplicate specimens” between anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and museums, collectors, and schools around the world in the late nineteenth century, this book reveals connections between both well-known museums and little-known local institutions, created through the exchange of museum objects. It explores how anthropologists categorized some objects in their collections as “duplicate specimens,” making them potential candidates for exchange. This historical form of what museum professionals would now call deaccessioning considers the intellectual and technical requirement of classifying objects in museums, and suggests that a deeper understanding of past museum practice can inform mission-driven contemporary museum work.

Author: Miruna Achim
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 081653957X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Museum Matters tells the story of Mexico's national collections through the trajectories of its objects. The essays in this book show the many ways in which things matter and affect how Mexico imagines its past, present, and future.

Author: Elizabeth Wood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351383515
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
In recent years, many museums have implemented sweeping changes in how they engage audiences. However, changes to the field’s approaches to collections stewardship have come much more slowly. Active Collections critically examines existing approaches to museum collections and explores practical, yet radical, ways that museums can better manage their collections to actively advance their missions. Approaching the question of modern museum collection stewardship from a position of "tough love," the authors argue that the museum field risks being constrained by rigid ways of thinking about objects. Examining the field’s relationship to objects, artifacts, and specimens, the volume explores the question of stewardship through the dissection of a broad range of issues, including questions of "quality over quantity," emotional attachment, dispassionate cataloging, and cognitive biases in curatorship. The essays look to insights from fields as diverse as forest management, library science, and the psychology of compulsive hoarding, to inform and innovate collection practices. Essay contributions come from both experienced museum professionals and scholars from disciplines as diverse as psychology, education, and history. The result is a critical exploration that makes the book essential reading for museum professionals, as well as those in training.

Author: Sandra Dudley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136616551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This is an innovative interdisciplinary book about objects and people within museums and galleries. It addresses fundamental issues of human sensory, emotional and aesthetic experience of objects. The chapters explore ways and contexts in which things and people mutually interact, and raise questions about how objects carry meaning and feeling, the distinctions between objects and persons, particular qualities of the museum as context for person-object engagements, and the active and embodied role of the museum visitor. Museum Materialities is divided into three sections – Objects, Engagements and Interpretations – and includes a foreword by Susan Pearce and an afterword by Howard Morphy. It examines materiality and other perceptual and ontological qualities of objects themselves; embodied sensory and cognitive engagements – both personal and across a wider audience spread – with particular objects or object types in a museum or gallery setting; notions of aesthetics, affect and wellbeing in museum contexts; and creative and innovative artistic and museum practices that seek to illuminate or critique museum objects and interpretations. Phenomenological and other approaches to embodied experience in an emphatically material world are current in a number of academic areas, most particularly strands of material culture studies within anthropology and cognate disciplines. Thus far, however, there has been no concerted application of this kind of approach to museum collections and interactions with them by museum visitors, curators, artists and researchers. Bringing together essays by scholars and practitioners from a wide disciplinary and international base, Museum Materialities seeks to make just such a contribution. In so doing it makes a valuable and original addition to the literature of both material culture studies and museum studies.

Author: Sandra H. Dudley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 041558177X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Museum Objects provides a set of readings that together create a distinctive emphasis and perspective on the objects which lie at the heart of interpretive practice in museums, material culture studies and everyday life. This reader brings together classic and up to date texts on the nature and definition of the object itself, the senses and embodied experience of objects. No other volume brings together such perspectives in this way, and no other volume includes such a focus on the museum context. Museum Objects incorporates both theorised and more practical readings from a range of international academic and contextual perspectives. The overall result is a definitive set of readings that offers a comprehensive understanding of objects and their place within the museum context.

Author: Steven Conn
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812221559
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In this broadly conceived study Steven Conn examines the development of American museums across the twentieth century with a historian's attention and a critic's eye. He focuses on an array of museum types and asks illuminating questions about the relationship between museums and American cultural life.

Author: Marjorie Shelley
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588397122
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collections of works of art from antiquities to modern and contemporary material. Their preservation is a responsibility shared by the many individuals employed at the Museum who oversee and have direct contact with the collection on a daily basis. The Care and Handing of Art Objects—first published in the 1940s and continually updated—offers a guide to the best practices in handling and preserving works of art while on display, in storage and in transit. It explains many of the fundamental principles of conservation that underlie these methods. One of its goals is to make the complexities of caring for a collection readily accessible. The first part offers basic guidelines for the preservation of the diverse types of materials and art objects found in the Met. Each chapter addresses the physical characteristics specific to the particular category, and the environmental, handling and housing factors to which one should be alert to prevent damage and ensure their preservation. Written by experts in the respective specialty, it addresses the Museum’s vast holdings summarizing the most critical preservation issues, many of which are amplified by photographs. As the table of contents makes evident these range from paintings on canvas and works on paper and photographs to furniture and objects made of stone, wood and metals to arms and armor, upholstery, ethnographic materials and many others. Part II succinctly describes factors that affect the collection as a whole: among them, current environmental standards for temperature, relative humidity, light exposure, storage and art in transit. Based on Museum protocols it addresses emergency preparedness and response, and integrated pest management. For easy reference, it includes charts on storage and display conditions, on factors contributing to deterioration, and a glossary of conservation terms, principles, and housing materials referenced in the individual chapters. Drawing upon the knowledge of conservators, scientists, and curators from many different departments, as well as technicians and engineers whose expertise crosses boundaries of culture, chronology, medium and condition, The Care and Handing of Art Objects is primarily directed to staff at the Met. It is, no less, an invaluable resource for students, collectors, small museums, museum study programs, art dealers, and members of the public who want to enhance their understanding of how works of art are safeguarded and the role environment, handling and materials play in making this possible.