A Companion to Museum Studies E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1306

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A Companion to Museum Studies captures the multidisciplinary approach to the study of the development, roles, and significance of museums in contemporary society.

• Collects first-rate original essays by leading figures from a range of disciplines and theoretical stances, including anthropology, art history, history, literature, sociology, cultural studies, and museum studies
• Examines the complexity of the museum from cultural, political, curatorial, historical and representational perspectives
• Covers traditional subjects, such as space, display, buildings, objects and collecting, and more contemporary challenges such as visiting, commerce, community and experimental exhibition forms

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Bibliographical Note

CHAPTER ONE: Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction

The New Museology

Representational Critique

Identity Politics

The Museum Phenomenon

Expanding Museum Studies

Expansion and Specificity

The Plural Public

Policy, Practice, and Provocation

The Encyclopedic Struggle

The Compass of the Companion

Bibliography

PART ONE: Perspectives, Disciplines, Concepts

CHAPTER TWO: Cultural Theory and Museum Studies

What is “Cultural Theory?”

Theorizing Meaning: Semiotics and Structuralism

Rethinking Saussure: Poststructuralism

Deconstructing Saussure: Derrida

Cultural Politics of Difference and Identity

The “Foucault Effect” in Museum Studies

Museum Studies Speaks Back to Cultural Theory

Reading Museums as Texts: Cultural Theory and Textuality

Developing a “Theoretical Museology”

Postscript

Bibliography

CHAPTER THREE: Sociology and the Social Aspects of Museums

Disciplinary Origins and Institutional Affinities

Cultures of Space

Materializing and Visualizing Knowledge

Institutional Critiques

Museums as Social Facts

Museums, People, and Cultures of Collecting

Museums as Agencies of Social Research

Disciplinary Change and Museum Studies

Bibliography

CHAPTER FOUR: Art History and Museology: Rendering the Visible Legible

Art History and Museology

The Art Museum Object

The Object in Space and Time

The Subject in the Museum

Molding Material: The Masonic Idea of the Museum

Conclusion

Bibliography

CHAPTER FIVE: Museums and Anthropologies: Practices and Narratives

Origins and Foundation Narratives, 1836–1931

Divergences, Eclipses, and Renewals, 1932–1994

Post-narrative Museology, 1994–2005

Bibliography

CHAPTER SIX: Collecting Practices

What is Collecting?

Collecting and Differentiation

Renaissance and Early Modern Collecting

Taxonomy and System

Modern Collecting and the Museum

Collecting Dilemmas

Individual and Popular Collecting

Reconfiguring Museum Collecting

Reflecting on Collecting and Re-centering Objects

Conclusion

Bibliography

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Conundrum of Ephemerality: Time, Memory, and Museums

Progress and Timelessness

Remembering and Forgetting: World War II and Collective Memory in Museums

A Natural History of Preservation and Destruction

Bibliography

PART TWO: Histories, Heritage, Identities

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Origins of the Public Museum

Classical Antiquity and Res Publica

Renaissance and the Reformation of Civil Space

Enlightenment and Assertions of the Museum’s Public

The Privatization of Public in Nineteenth-century America

Conclusion

Bibliography

CHAPTER NINE: World Fairs and Museums

World Fairs

Exhibitionary Complexes and G. Brown Goode

Complicating the Story of Exhibitionary Complexes

Showcases of Science and Technology

Visitors and Performers

Conclusion

Bibliography

CHAPTER TEN: Making and Remaking National Identities

Nation, Nationalism, and National Identity

Ethnicity as Identity

Religion as Identity

Ideology as Identity

The Museum and the Nation in the Twenty-first Century

Museums and their Study

Into the Future

Bibliography

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Museums and Community

The Links between Community Studies and Museum Studies

Understanding Community

Museums and the Construction of Community Identity

Museums and Community Development

Conclusion: Revisiting the Museum Idea through Community

Bibliography

CHAPTER TWELVE: Re-staging Histories and Identities

Changing Histories, Changing Exhibitions

Beyond National Histories

History and the Staging of History

Conclusions

Bibliography

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Heritage

The Rise of Heritage as a Global and Local Phenomenon

Premises of Contemporary Heritage

Two Examples

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

PART THREE: Architecture, Space, Media

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Museum Architecture: A Brief History

kCollecting/Displaying: The Birth of the Museum

The Museum as Monument

The Museum as Instrument

On the Museum’s Ruins?

Bibliography

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Insight versus Entertainment: Untimely Meditations on the Architecture of Twentieth-century Art Museums

Modernism against the Museum

After the War: The Seduction of History

In Search of Distinctiveness

The Cultural Supermarket: Shopping and Entertainment as Ideology

Postmodernism: Back to Venerability

Crisis and Distraction

Noisy Silence

Plea for Niches

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Civic Seeing: Museums and the Organization of Vision

Divided Seeing: Visual Competence and the Art Museum

Seeing and Enacting Nature’s Civic Lessons

From Obstructed to Distracted Vision

Seeing Differences Differently

Acknowledgment

Bibliography

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Space Syntax: The Language of Museum Space

The Basic Ideas of Space Syntax

Showing How Layout Shapes Movement and Co-presence

Studying Museums and Galleries with Space Syntax

Design Choices

Space and Knowledge

Comparing Design Alternatives

Space and Visiting Culture

Spatial Genotypes

Space and the Viewer

Space and Cognitive Function

Space as a Symbolic System

Interaction between Architectural and Curatorial Strategy

The Museum/Gallery as a Spatial Type

Conclusion

Bibliography

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: New Media

Historicizing New Media

Museums as Media

Comparing New Media and Museums

Remediating the Museum

Interactivity and Immediacy

Power Plays, Commerce, and Media Magic

New Media and the Return to Curiosity

Bibliography

PART FOUR: Visitors, Learning, Interacting

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Living in a Learning Society: Museums and Free-choice Learning

Changes in Perceptions of Learning

Toward a Usable Model for Understanding Learning from Museums

Changes in Museum Learning Research

Developing a Responsive Methodology

Museums in the Twenty-first Century

Bibliography

CHAPTER TWENTY: Museum Education

Defining Museum Education

Early Museum Education

Modern Museum Education

Educational Theory

The Constructivist Museum

Social Change and Social Responsibility

Note

Bibliography

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Interactivity: Thinking Beyond

Interactivity as “Interactives”

Interactives, Audience, and Entertainment

Pedagogies

Conclusion

Bibliography

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Studying Visitors

The Scope of Museum Visitor Studies

Getting the Message: Evaluating Exhibitions or Evaluating Visitors?

Counting and Mapping

New Paradigms: The Turn to Understanding

Bibliography

PART FIVE: Globalization, Profession, Practice

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Globalization: Incorporating the Museum

Globalization Theory and Museums

Administration, Curating, and Technology

Architecture and Design

Consumption

Hybrids and Alternatives

Bibliography

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Cultural Economics

Supply

Organizational form of museums

Demand

Social Demand

The Institutional Approach to Museum Behavior

Public vs Private Museums

How Institutions Affect Behavior in Four Important Areas

Competition between Museums

Conclusions

Bibliography

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: The Museum Profession

Expansion of Museum Employment

Changes in Roles

Diversification of Museum Work

Challenges of Change

A Changing Profession

Professional Education and Training

Conclusion

Bibliography

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Museum Ethics

The Philosophical Origins of Ethics

Codifying Museum Ethics

Accountability: To Whom?

Collections: Ethical Management of a Core Resource

Applying Ethics in the Museum

Ethics and the Law

Conclusion

Bibliography

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Museum Practice: Legal Issues

Legal Structure

De-accessioning Policies and Paradigms

Restitution from Museum Collections

Conclusion

Bibliography

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Non-Western Models of Museums and Curation in Cross-cultural Perspective

Critical and Comparative Museology

Indigenous Models of Museums and Curation

Comparing Western and Indigenous Models: Access and Objects

Indigenous Models of Curation

Cross-cultural Approaches to Curation and Heritage Management

Bibliography

PART SIX: Culture Wars, Transformations, Futures

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Incivilities in Civil(-ized) Places: “Culture Wars” in Comparative Perspective

Why Do Culture Wars Occur?

Why Do Museums Become Battlegrounds?

Does the Model Pass Muster?

The Battle Within

The Battle Abroad

Conclusion

Note

Bibliography

CHAPTER THIRTY: Science Museums and the Culture Wars

The Certainty of Science in an Uncertain World

The Classification of the Science Museum

Category Jumpers: Museums and Anthropological Objects

NAGPRA and the Return to the Natives

Science and Technology in the Nuclear Age

A Nineteenth-century Museum in a Twenty-first Century World

Bibliography

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Postmodern Restructurings

Urban Regeneration and the Soft City

Spectacles of Exhibition and Display

Postmodern Perception: From Distinction to Distraction?

Conclusion: Going, Going, Gone?

Bibliography

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Exposing the Public

Interferences

Second-personhood

Framing

Translation

The Other Side of the Publics

Acknowledgment

Bibliography

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: The Future of the Museum

The Technophiliac’s Dream

The Convergence of Commerce and Culture

The Shrinking World of the Object

Challenging Orthodox Futurology

A Path toward the Future

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS IN CULTURAL STUDIES

Advisory editor: David Theo Goldberg, University of California, Irvine

This series provides theoretically ambitious but accessible volumes devoted to the major fields and subfields within cultural studies, whether as single disciplines (film studies) inspired and reconfigured by interventionist cultural studies approaches, or from broad interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives (gender studies, race and ethnic studies, postcolonial studies). Each volume sets out to ground and orientate the student through a broad range of specially commissioned articles and also to provide the more experienced scholar and teacher with a convenient and comprehensive overview of the latest trends and critical directions. An overarching Companion to Cultural Studies will map the territory as a whole.

1. A Companion to Film TheoryEdited by Toby Miller and Robert Stam

2. A Companion to Postcolonial StudiesEdited by Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray

3. A Companion to Cultural StudiesEdited by Toby Miller

4. A Companion to Racial and Ethnic StudiesEdited by David Theo Goldberg and JohnSolomos

5. A Companion to Art TheoryEdited by Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde

6. A Companion to Media StudiesEdited by AngharadValdivia

7. A Companion to Literature and FilmEdited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo

8. A Companion to Gender StudiesEdited by Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg, and Audrey Kobayashi

9. A Companion to Asian American StudiesEdited by Kent A. Ono

10. A Companion to TelevisionEdited by Janet Wasko

11. A Companion to African American StudiesEdited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon

12. A Companion to Museum StudiesEdited by Sharon Macdonald

13. A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer StudiesEdited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry

14. A Companion to Latina/o StudiesEdited by Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo

This edition first published 2011

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2011 Sharon

Macdonald

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2006)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to museum studies / edited by Sharon Macdonald. p. cm.—(Blackwell companions in cultural studies ; 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-0839-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4443-3405-0 (paperback : alk. paper) 1. Museums—Philosophy. 2. Museums—Social aspects. 3. Museum techniques. I. Macdonald, Sharon. II. Series. AM7.C59 2006 069—dc22 2005033629

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Set in 10.5/12.5pt Ehrhardt by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed in Singapore

01 2011

Illustrations

4.1Sir John Soane’s Museum: interior of the Dome area4.2Plan and section of Sir John Soane’s Museum4.3Bust of Sir John Soane from behind5.1View of Pitt Rivers Museum5.2“Modernist”-type display in the Great Hall, Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia6.1Case “Sp” in the alphabetical display of the North Gallery of Scottish Ethnography in the Marischal Museum, Aberdeen6.2A contemporary curiosity cabinet from the collections of the Humboldt University of Berlin7.1Enola Gay exhibit, National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC8.1Frontispiece from Ferrante Imperato, Dell’historia naturale …, 15998.2Hubert Robert, La Grande Galerie [of the Louvre], c.17958.3“Art Gallery [in the Metropolitan Museum of Art]” from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 18809.1US Government Exhibit, Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 18769.2Philadelphia Commercial Museum10.1Native American education interpreter, National Museum of the American Indian10.2Entrance to the George Gustav Heye Exhibition Center, National Museum of the American Indian10.3Asia, figural sculpture by Daniel Chester French (1907)10.4America, figural sculpture by Daniel Chester French (1907)10.5Memorial to the defenders of the city of Leningrad (St Petersburg), Russia11.1Community exhibition, Newry, Northern Ireland, July 200311.2Community exhibition, Lisburn, Northern Ireland, July 200311.3Community exhibition, Lisburn, Northern Ireland, July 200312.1The Hercules Farnese in the exhibition Prometheus: Humans – Images – Visions, 1988–913.1Baghdad Museum, May 200313.2Anne Frank House Museum and memorial, Amsterdam13.3Topography of Terror, Berlin13.4Exterior of the Neue Wache, Berlin13.5Interior of the Neue Wache, Berlin13.6“Disney American History Theme Park” cartoon13.7“Symbols of Heritage” cartoon13.8Recovery of Historical Memory Project, Guatemala City14.1Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, “Ideal design for a museum: plan,” 1817–1914.2Leo von Klenze, Glyptothek, Munich (1815–30)14.3Karl Friedrich von Schinkel, Altes Museum, Berlin (1823–30)14.4View of the Alte Pinakothek from the south-east14.5Thomas Dean and Benjamin Woodward, Oxford University Museum (1855–60)14.6Alessandro Mendini’s team, Groninger Museum, Groningen (1995)14.7Josef Paul Kleihues, Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main (1985–9)14.8Herzog and de Meuron, Tate Modern, London (2000)14.9Turbine hall, Tate Modern14.10Yoshio Taniguchi, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002–4)15.1Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek15.2Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1943–6, 1956–9)15.3Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris (1971–7)15.4Extension of the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (1977–83)15.5Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (1993–7)15.6Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (1990–7)16.1The work of art: rural literalism satirized as a new form of cultural illiteracy, 185916.2Attentive viewing: Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in his Museum, 182216.3Distracted vision: George Seurat, Cirque, 189116.4Wonder as gawking: “Lost in Wonder”16.5The spectator as exhibit: Duane Hanson, Tourists, 197017.1Space is intrinsic to human activity17.2a–bSpatial layouts seen from different points17.2cThe relations between each space and others in the layout17.3The justified graphs of the rural French house17.4a–bThe traces of a hundred people entering the Tate Britain gallery17.5View of spatial relationships between statues at Castelvecchio Museum, Verona17.6aThe abcd typology of spaces in the layout17.6b–dThe plan for a museum designed by L. C. Sturm in 170417.7a–bThe museum/gallery as a spatial type18.1“Orbis Pictus Revised: Touching and Feeling” interactive computer installation20.1Theories of education21.1Discovery learning at Kid’s Island, Australian Museum, Sydney29.1The Apartheid Museum, South Africa32.1Gustave Courbet, Woman with a Parrot, 186632.2Edouard Manet, Woman with a Parrot, 186632.3Gerrit Pietersz Sweelinck, Judith Shows the Head of Holophernes, 160532.4Installation shot of Gerrit Pietersz Sweelinck, Judith Shows the Head of Holophernes, 160532.5Marlene Dumas, The Woman of Algiers, 200033.1Te Papa Tongarewa National Museum of New Zealand33.2IT Gallery interior, National Portrait Gallery, London

Notes on Contributors

JeffreyAbt is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, Wayne State University. His most recent book is A Museum on the Verge: A Socioeconomic History of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1882–2000 (2001). His next book, tentatively titled A Scholar for our Time: James H. Breasted and Academic Entrepreneurship in Early Twentieth-century America and the Near East, is an intellectual biography of America’s first formally trained Egyptologist and one of the most celebrated scholars and institution builders of his time.

Marianna Adams works at the Institute for Learning Innovation, Annapolis, Maryland. Her research priorities include evaluation as an agent of organizational change, professional development and participatory evaluation, the impact of multi-visit museum programs on student learning, and the use of drawings as an evaluation methodology for children.

MiekeBal, a well-known cultural critic and theorist, holds the position of Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is also Professor of the Theory of Literature in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. Her many books include Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999), Looking In: The Art of Viewing (2001), Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-writing (2001), and Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (2002). A Mieke Bal Reader is forthcoming. Her areas of interest include literary theory, semiotics, visual art, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, French, the Hebrew Bible, the seventeenth century, and contemporary culture. She is also a video artist.

Rosmarie Beier-de Haan is Head of Collection and Exhibition Curator at the Berlin Historical Museum, Berlin, and Honorary Professor of Modern History at the Institute of History and Art History at the Technical University, Berlin. She is a board member of ICOM, the International Association of History Museums, of ICOM Germany, and the Network of European Museums. Her main areas of research interest are reflected in her exhibitions on the history of cultures and mentalities, and in her publications, including Geschichtskultur in der Zweiten Moderne (ed., 2000) and Erinnerte Geschichte – Inszenierte Geschichte: Museen und Ausstellungen in der Zweiten Moderne (2005).

Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University and a Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, jointly managed between the Open University and the University of Manchester. His current interests focus on the sociology of culture, with special reference to questions of culture and governance, culture and social change, the history and theory of museums, and the role of culture in the ordering of social differences. His publications include The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995), Culture: A Reformer’s Science (1998), Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics, Programs (co-edited with David Carter, 2001), Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (2004), and (co-edited with Larry Grossberg and Meaghan Morris) New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (2005). He was elected to membership of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998.

Tristram Besterman, Director of the Manchester Museum, has worked in museums in both the UK and Australia, and has extensive experience of leading, managing, and developing museum services in both the local authority and university sectors. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society, a Fellow of the UK Museums Association, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. For over two decades, he has been influential in the development of museum ethics in the UK and internationally, having served as Convener of the Museums Association Ethics Committee until 2001 and as a member of the Ministerial Working Group on Human Remains from 2001 to 2004.

Patrick J. Boylan is Professor Emeritus of Heritage Policy and Management at City University, London, where, from 1990, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Arts Policy and Management. Prior to that, he spent almost thirty years in senior positions in museums and museum organizations, including Director of the Leicestershire County Museums, Arts and Records Service. He has served as the Centenary President of the UK’s Museums Association, and from 1977 has held a wide range of offices in the UNESCO-linked International Council of Museums (ICOM), including service as a Member of the Executive Council (1989–98), Vice-President (1992–8), President of the ICOM International Committee for the Training of Personnel (1983–9 and 1998–2004), and of ICOM UK (1985–91). He has advised UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the World Bank, the British Council, and many governments and other agencies on issues relating to arts and heritage policy and management, and in 2004 was elected an Honorary Member of ICOM.

Steven Conn is the author of Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (1998) and History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (2004). He is currently working on a book on twentieth-century American museums.

Susan A. Crane is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Arizona. Her recent publications include Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth Century Germany (2000) and Museums and Memory (2000). She is currently working on projects about subjectivity in contemporary history writing, and the history of southern German religious migration to Russia in the 1820s.

Elizabeth Crooke is Senior Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages of Ulster, University of Ulster and Course Director of the PgDip/MA in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies. Her research interests consider the social, cultural, and political roles of museums and heritage. She is the author of Politics, Archaeology and the Creation of a National Museum of Ireland (2000) and is currently writing a book on museums and community.

Lynn D. Dierking is Associate Director of the Institute for Learning Innovation, Annapolis, Maryland, and an internationally recognized authority on the behavior and learning of children, families, and adults in free-choice learning settings. Her publications include four books co-authored with John H. Falk, The Museum Experience (1992), Collaboration: Critical Criteria for Success (1997), Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (2000), and Lessons without Limit: How Free-choice Learning is Transforming Education (2002); and one book co-authored with Wendy Pollack, Questioning Assumptions: An Introduction to Front-end Studies in Museums (1998). She also co-edited a volume with John H. Falk, Public Institutions for Personal Learning: Establishing a Research Agenda (1995). She serves on the editorial boards of Science Education and the Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship.

Steven C. Dubin is Professor of Arts Administration at Columbia University. He is author of Bureaucratizing the Muse: Public Funds and the Cultural Worker (1987), Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions (1992), Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from Enola Gay to Sensation (2000), and Mounting Queen Victoria: Transforming Museums in a Democratic South Africa (2006); and has written and lectured widely on censorship, controversial art and museum exhibitions, government funding of the arts, popular culture, and mass media. The recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship to South Africa in 2003, he is writing a book about the post-apartheid transformation of museum exhibition and collection policies, staffs, and audiences.

John H. Falk is Director of the Institute for Learning Innovation, Annapolis, Maryland. He worked at the Smithsonian Institution for fourteen years where he held a number of senior positions including Director of the Smithsonian Office of Educational Research. He is the author of over ninety articles and essays in the areas of biology, psychology, and education, co-author with Lynn D. Dierking of The Museum Experience (1992), Collaboration: Critical Criteria for Success (1997), Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (2000), and Lessons without Limit: How Free-choice Learning is Transforming Education (2002), and editor of Free-choice Science Education: How We Learn Science Outside of School (2001).

Bruno S. Frey is Professor of Economics at the University of Zurich and Research Director of CREMA – Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts. He has been awarded an honorary doctorate in economics from the University of St Gallen and the University of Göteborg. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Not Just for the Money (1997), Economics as a Science of Human Behaviour (1999), The New Democratic Federalism for Europe (1999), Arts and Economics (2000), Inspiring Economics (2001), Successful Management by Motivation (2001), Happiness and Economics (2002), and Dealing with Terrorism: Stick or Carrot? (2004).

Gordon Fyfe is a Fellow of Keele University where he was, until recently, Senior Lecturer in Sociology. He has published essays on the historical sociology of art and art museums with particular reference to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is co-editor, with Sharon Macdonald, of Theorizing Museums (1996) and author of Art, Power and Modernity (2000), which explores the development of Victorian art institutions and assesses their role in social reproduction. He is also a co-editor of the journal Museum and Society.

Patty Gerstenblith has been Professor of Law at DePaul University College of Law since 1984. She received a BA from Bryn Mawr College, a PhD in Art History and Anthropology from Harvard University, and a JD from Northwestern University School of Law. Before joining the DePaul faculty, she clerked for the Honorable Richard D. Cudahy of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She served as editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Cultural Property from 1995 to 2002 and as a public representative on the President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee from 2000 to 2003. She currently serves as President of the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation and co-chair of the American Bar Association’s International Cultural Property Committee. Her book, Art, Cultural Heritage and the Law, was published in 2004.

Michaela Giebelhausen is Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the University of Essex, and Co-director of the MA in Gallery Studies. She has published widely on the development of prison architecture, museum architecture, and on Pre-Raphaelite painting. She is editor of The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts (2003) and author of Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (2006). She is currently working on her next book, The City in Ruins.

George E. Hein, Professor Emeritus at Lesley University, is active in visitor studies and museum education as a researcher and teacher. He was a Fulbright Research Fellow at King’s College London, visiting faculty member at the University of Leicester Museum Studies Program, Visiting Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and Visiting

Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney. He also served as president of ICOM/CECA. He is the author of Learning in the Museum (1998) and, with Mary Alexander, Museums: Places of Learning (1998). His primary current interest is the significance of John Dewey’s work for museums.

Michelle Henning is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She has worked as an installation artist and published essays on photography and new media. She is the author of Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (2006).

Bill Hillier is Professor of Architecture and Urban Morphology and Director of the Space Syntax Laboratory at University College London, where he pioneered the methods of analysis known as “space syntax.” He is author of The Social Logic of Space (1984), Space is the Machine (1996), and a large number of essays and articles concerned with space in buildings and cities.

Steven Hoelscher is a cultural geographer with research interests in the connections between identity, place, and heritage. His books include Heritage on Stage (1998) and Textures of Place (co-edited, 2001). He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is Associate Professor of American Studies and Geography at the University of Texas.

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill is Professor of Museum Studies and Director of the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG) at the University of Leicester. Her research interests focus on the relationships between museums and their audiences. She is the author of Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (1992), Museums and their Visitors (1994), and Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (2000), and editor of The Educational Role of the Museum (2nd edn, 1999). She is currently working on Museums and Learning: New Dimensions.

Flora Edouwaye S. Kaplan is an anthropologist, and Professor Emerita, Faculty of Arts and Science, at New York University, where she also founded and directed the postgraduate Museum Studies Program. She has carried out fieldwork in Nigeria (where she has held a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Benin), Mexico, and the United States; has been a museum curator (in the Department of Primitive Art and New World Cultures, The Brooklyn Museum); and has served on the National Committee of the American Association/International Council of Museums and on the executive committee of the International Committee for Museology. She has published widely on Benin religion, art, and gender, as well as museology. Her publications include Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses, and Power: Case-studies in African Gender (1997), Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”: The Role of Objects in National Identity (ed. 1994), and Benin Art and Culture (2006). In 1990, His Royal Highness, Oba Erediauwa of Benin, named her Edouwaye, meaning, “You have come home to Benin,” making her a “Benin woman of honor,” equivalent to a male chieftaincy title, and the first scholar to be so recognized.

Christina Kreps is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Museum Studies and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Denver. Her research interests include critical and comparative museology, art and cultural expression, international cultural policy, and culture and development. Her recent publications include Liberating Culture: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation (2003) and “Curatorship as Social Practice” in Curator 46 (3), 2003.

Sharon Macdonald is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Sheffield. Her books include Theorizing Museums (1996, co-edited with Gordon Fyfe), Reimagining Culture (1997), The Politics of Display (ed., 1998), Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (2002), and Exhibition Experiments (2006, co-edited with Paul Basu). Her current primary research is an historical and ethnographic study of representations of the Nazi past in Germany.

Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani is Professor of the History of Urban Design and Head of Network City and Landscape at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, and director of an architectural practice in Milan. He has also held positions at academic institutions in Stuttgart, Berlin, Frankfurt, Milan, and Pamplona, as well as at the universities of Columbia and Harvard. He has curated exhibitions about architecture that have been shown in Germany, France, Italy, and the US; and between 1990 and 1995 was Director of the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt. From 1986 to 1990 he was deputy editor and from 1990 to 1995 editor of Domus. Many of his numerous publications have been translated into English, including Museum Architecture in Frankfurt 1980–1990(1990) and Museums for a New Millennium: Concepts, Projects, Buildings (with Angeli Sachs, 1999).

Rhiannon Mason lectures in museum, gallery, and heritage studies at the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, University of Newcastle. Her research interests include critical and cultural theory, museum histories, new museology, and museum representations of cultural identities. She is currently working on a book about the construction and representation of national identities in the National Museums and Galleries of Wales.

Stephan Meier is a Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He studied history, economics, and political science at the universities of Zurich and Barcelona. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Zurich. His forthcoming book entitled An Economic Analysis of Pro-social Behavior (2006) analyzes empirically the conditions for contributions to public goods.

Donald Preziosi is the author of eleven books on art, architecture, archaeology, and museology, the most recent being Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (2003), Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (co-edited with Clare Farago, 2004), and a collection of his essays entitled In the Aftermath of Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics (2005). In 2001 he delivered the Slade

Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford University. He has taught at various universities in the US, including Yale, MIT, and UCLA, where he is now also Emeritus Professor of Art History.

Nick Prior is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in the sociology of art, urban sociology, and cultural theory. He is author of Museums and Modernity (2002) and a number of essays exploring the fate of modern art museums in contemporary culture.

Mark W. Rectanus is Professor of German Studies, Iowa State University. He has published on print culture, media, and the publishing industry in Germany and the US; cultural politics and corporate sponsorships; museums studies; conceptual art and performance studies. His most recent book is Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships (2002).

Robert W. Rydell is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University, Bozeman. He has published many books and articles about world fairs. His most recent book is Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (with Rob Kroes, 2005).

Charles Saumarez Smith has been Director of the National Gallery, London since 2002. He was Director of the National Portrait Gallery from 1994 to 2002, and in 2001 was Slade Professor at the University of Oxford.

Anthony Alan Shelton is Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Professor of Art History, Visual Culture, and Theory, and Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. He is author of numerous papers on critical museology, and editor of Museums and Changing Perspectives of Culture (1995), Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other (2001), and Collectors: Individuals and Institutions (2001).

Kali Tzortzi is an archaeologist-museologist and a doctorate candidate at the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, University College London. She has worked as a Project Consultant for Space Syntax Ltd, London, and her recent work is concerned with issues of museum space and its relation to patterns of use.

Andrea Witcomb is Senior Lecturer, Cultural Heritage Program, Faculty of Built Environment, Art and Design, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia. She is the author of Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (2003) and editor of The Open Museum Journal, an electronic, peer-reviewed journal found on the Australian Museums Online website. Her interest in interactivity in museums is an outcome of her wider interest in the ways in which contemporary multimedia practices connect with the politics of representation in museum exhibitions. Before entering academia, she worked as a curator in Australian Museums.

Acknowledgments

The first acknowledgment in a volume like this must go to the contributors on whom it all rests. Especial thanks go to those who also helped me out with queries, suggestions, reading, and pictures in relation to chapters other than their own; and to those anonymous others who acted as readers. Jane Fargnoli and Ken Provencher at Blackwell were enthusiastic and supportive when it mattered. You really should write that survival guide, Ken. Thanks too to Mike, Tara, Thomas and Harriet Beaney, true companions throughout.

Bibliographical Note

Items marked with an asterisk in the bibliographies are especially recommended for further reading.

CHAPTER ONE

Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction

Sharon Macdonald

Museum studies has come of age. Over the past decade in particular, the number of books, journals, courses, and events dedicated to museum studies has grown enormously. It has moved from being an unusual and minority subject into the mainstream. Disciplines which previously paid relatively little attention to museums have come to see the museum as a site at which some of the most interesting and significant of their debates and questions can be explored in novel, and often excitingly applicable, ways. They have also come to recognize that understanding the museum requires moving beyond intra-disciplinary concerns to greater dialogue with others, and to adopting and adapting questions, techniques, and approaches derived from other areas of disciplinary expertise. All of this has contributed to museum studies becoming one of the most genuinely multi- and increasingly inter-disciplinary areas of the academy today.

This Companion to Museum Studies is intended to act as a guide through the thronging multi-disciplinary landscape; and to contribute to and develop cross-disciplinary dialogue about museums. By bringing together museum scholars from different disciplines and backgrounds, it presents a broad range of perspectives and identifies the most vital contemporary questions and concerns in museums, and in museum studies. Authors discuss what they regard as particularly important and interesting within their own fields of expertise in relation to key topics in museum studies, and they present original perspectives and arguments that constitute significant autonomous contributions to their specific areas as well as to museum studies more generally. The chapters have been specially commissioned for this volume, though in two cases they are expanded from earlier, shorter papers (chapters 15 and 33). Contributors to this Companion are museum scholars versed in relevant academic debates and many also have direct professional experience of working in or with museums, in a closer and more vibrant relationship between the museum and the academy – and practice and theory – that is a hallmark of expanding museum studies today.

The museum studies represented by this volume has its roots in, and takes up the challenge set by, developments often described as “the new museology” (see below). However, it also goes beyond some of what might be called the “first wave” of new museological work by broadening its scope, expanding its methodological approaches, and deepening its empirical base. It also asks questions of some of the new orthodoxies – including the supremacy of the visitor – that have found their way into contemporary museum practice; and it suggests possible new avenues for future museum work and study. This expanded and expanding museum studies does not, however, have a single “line,” and it is significant that a collective plural noun is replacing a singular one. Perhaps more than anything, museum studies today recognize (to use the plural now) the multiplicity and complexity of museums, and call for a correspondingly rich and multi-faceted range of perspectives and approaches to comprehend and provoke museums themselves.

The New Museology

In his introduction to The New Museology, an edited collection published in 1989, Peter Vergo expressed well the change from what he called “the old museology” to the new. The old, he wrote, was “too much about museum methods, and too little about the purposes of museums” (Vergo 1989: 3). The old was predominantly concerned with “how to” matters of, say, administration, education, or conservation; rather than seeking to explore the conceptual foundations and assumptions that established such matters as significant in the first place or that shaped the way in which they were addressed. By contrast, the “new museology” was more theoretical and humanistic. Although Vergo’s volume was only one of a number of interventions made under the rubric of “the new museology” (see chapters 2 and 10 of this volume), it is worth looking at its content and coverage (despite its own acknowledgment that these are not intended to be comprehensive) in order to identify some of the main points of departure from “the old museology.” Three seem to me to be particularly indicative.

The first is a call to understand the meanings of museum objects as situated and contextual rather than inherent. Vergo’s own chapter, with its elegant concept of “the reticent object,” makes this argument, as do various others, including that of Charles Saumarez Smith (1989), whose story of the way in which a seventeenth-century doorway became the logo of V&A Enterprises, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new commercial company, has become a classic example of shifting object meanings.

The doorway example also illustrates the second area to which the new museology drew attention: namely, matters that might earlier have been seen as outside the remit of museology proper, such as commercialism and entertainment. Chapters on great exhibitions and theme parks, as well as Stephen Bann’s reflections on what he calls “fragmentary or incomplete expressions of the museological function” (Bann 1989: 100) – for example, individual quests to assemble histories – highlight continuities between museums and other spaces and practices, thus throwing into question the “set apartness” of the museum or the idea that it is “above” mundane or market concerns.

Linked with both the first and second is the third: how the museum and its exhibitions may be variously perceived, especially by those who visit. This is speculated upon in many of the chapters, and some valuable empirical evidence is provided in that of Nick Merriman (1989; see also chapter 22 of this volume). Collectively, then, these three areas of emphasis demonstrate a shift to seeing the museum and the meaning of its contents not as fixed and bounded, but as contextual and contingent.

Representational Critique

The shift in perspective evident in The New Museology was part of a broader development in many cultural and social disciplines that gathered pace during the 1980s. It entailed particular attention to questions of representation – that is, to how meanings come to be inscribed and by whom, and how some come to be regarded as “right” or taken as given. Academic disciplines and the knowledge they produced were also subject to this “representational critique.” Rather than seeing them as engaged in a value-free discovery of ever-better knowledge, there was a move toward regarding knowledge, and its pursuit, realization, and deployment, as inherently political. What was researched, how and why, and, just as significantly, what was ignored or taken for granted and not questioned, came to be seen as matters to be interrogated and answered with reference not only to justifications internal to disciplines but also to wider social and political concerns. In particular, the ways in which differences, and especially inequalities, of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class, could be reproduced by disciplines – perhaps through exclusions from “the canon,” “the norm,” “the objective,” or “the notable” – came under the spotlight. This mattered, it was argued, not least because such representations fed back into the world beyond the academy, supporting particular regimes of power, most usually the status quo.

In response to such critiques, greater “reflexivity” – in the form of greater attention to the processes by which knowledge is produced and disseminated, and to the partial (in both senses of the word) and positioned nature of knowledge itself – was called for. This led to a flourishing of work that sought to “deconstruct” cultural products, such as texts or exhibitions, in order to highlight their politics and the strategies by which they were positioned as “objective” or “true,” and to probe the historical, social, and political contexts in which certain kinds of knowledge reigned and others were marginalized or ignored.

The critique of representation at the level of cultural products and disciplines was itself part of a broader critique of the way in which the “voices” of certain groups were excluded from, or marginalized within, the public sphere. The challenge came especially from postcolonial and feminist activists and scholars who argued that existing, broadly liberal democratic, political models were inadequate to tackling the fundamental representational inequities involved. What was needed was a politics of recognition, specifically addressing not just whether people had the right to vote and otherwise participate as citizens but potentially more fundamental matters, such as whether the concerns of marginalized groups even made it onto the agenda. In the increasingly multicultural cities of North America and Europe in particular, political positions and claims came with increasing frequency to be articulated in terms of the needs and rights of “under-” or “mis-recognized” identities.

Identity Politics

It was in this context of “identity politics” that museums were subject to new critical attention. In many ways, the museum is an institution of recognition and identity par excellence. It selects certain cultural products for official safe-keeping, for posterity and public display – a process which recognizes and affirms some identities, and omits to recognize and affirm others. This is typically presented in a language – spoken through architecture, spatial arrangements, and forms of display as well as in discursive commentary – of fact, objectivity, superior taste, and authoritative knowledge.

The challenge to museum representation came, then, not only from theory and the academy. As is discussed especially in Part VI of this Companion, there have been a number of high-profile controversies about exhibitions, especially since the 1980s, which have collectively raised questions about how decisions are made about what should end up on public display, and who should be involved in making them. Various groups have protested about the ways in which they were represented in exhibitions, or excluded from museum attention altogether; and there have been demands for the return of objects to indigenous peoples (see, for example, chapters 5, 26, and 27 of this volume).

At the same time, others spoke out against what they saw as an unnecessary political correctness and postmodernist relativity leading museums away from their proper mandate to represent the majority high culture and truth and act as repositories of the collective treasure for the future. Museums found themselves at the center of the wider “culture wars” over whether it was or was not possible or permissible to see some cultural products and forms of knowledge as in any sense more valuable or valid than others (see chapters 29 and 30 of this volume). Museums became, in short, sites at which some of the most contested and thorny cultural and epistemological questions of the late twentieth century were fought out.

The Museum Phenomenon

These were not the only reasons why museums began to excite new levels of interest among cultural commentators, policy-makers, and scholars in many disciplines. The empirical fact that intrigued many was what Gordon Fyfe (chapter 3) calls “the museum phenomenon”: namely, the extraordinary growth in the number of museums throughout the world in the second half of the twentieth century, especially since the 1970s. Ninety-five per cent of existing museums are said to have been founded since World War II (see chapter 13). This “phenomenon” showed not only that the museum could not just be understood as an “old” institution or relic of a previous age, but also that the critiques of representation had not undermined confidence in the museum as a cultural form. Indeed, as chapters 10, 11, and 29 demonstrate, the museum came to be embraced precisely by some of those who had reason to be critical of aspects of its earlier identity-work.

The museum phenomenon cannot be accounted for wholly by a proliferation of museums to represent previously marginalized groups, however. Indeed, just as significant as the expansion in the number of museums was a stretching of their range and variability, including a blurring into other kinds of institution and event. So, while at one end of the scale there was a proliferation of small, low-budget, neighborhood museums, often concentrating on the culture of everyday life or local heritage; at the other, corporate museums, the development of museum “franchises,” “blockbuster” shows, iconic “landmark” architecture (chapters 14 and 15), “superstar” museums (chapter 24) and “meta-museums” (chapter 23) also flourished. Certainly, these could be bound up with the representation of identity too – especially with cities promoting their distinctiveness in the global competition for prestige and a share of the cultural tourism market, and with corporations deploying the museum as part of their own image-marketing. But understanding them needed also to consider questions of spectacle, “promotional culture,” the global traffic in symbols, and flows of capital (see, especially, chapters 23, 24, and 31).

The museum phenomenon is best seen as a product of the coming together of a heady mix of partially connected motivations and concerns. These include, inter alia, anxieties about “social amnesia” – forgetting the past (chapter 7); quests for authenticity, “the real thing,” and “antidotes” to the throwaway consumer society (chapters 3, 6, and 33); attempts to deal with the fragmentation of identity and individualization (chapter 12); and desires for life-long and experiential learning (chapters 19 and 20). Indeed, although discussion of the changes in museums in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first was not a specific remit for most contributors to this book, almost all comment upon it, so providing a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary reflection on its nature, significance, and implications.

One of the key questions arising from the proliferation of museums is whether it will be possible to sustain. Will the public be afflicted with collective “museum fatigue” in the face of too much of a similar thing, however good (however defined)? The evidence at present is inconclusive: new museums continue to open, though there have also been closures and (some high profile) plans shelved. The question is also complicated by the fact that it is not always clear what should “count” as a museum. The development of “museums” that do not possess permanent collections or only “token” ones, including some corporate museums and most science centers, and the emergence of the virtual museum (chapter 18), also contribute to a definitional quagmire and to the continuing soul-searching about what is a museum – and also to what it might or should be. Contributors here offer their own, various, answers. Rather than seeing these developments and difficulties as threatening the validity of the museum as a focus of study, however, the new museum studies embrace these as part of a continuing and expanding fascination with museums.

Expanding Museum Studies

The expanded and pluralized museum studies build on insights of the new museology and representational critique to further develop areas to which these drew attention but also to extend the scope of study. In addition to this broadening of scope, there is also a growing recognition of the complexity – and often ambivalent nature – of museums, which calls for greater theoretical and methodological sophistication. What we see in museum studies as represented here is a broader range of methods brought to bear and the development of approaches specifically honed to trying to understand the museum. Also characteristic is a renewed commitment to trying to bring together the insights from academic studies with the practical work of museums – to return to some of the “how to” concerns of the “old museology” from a new, more theoretically and empirically informed, basis.

This Companion to Museum Studies as a whole speaks to and illustrates the new museum studies more eloquently than can a brief introduction and overview. It is, however, worth noting some of the ways in which the new museum studies have built on and developed the three areas outlined above as particularly indicative of the new museology. First, the new museological idea that object meanings may change in different contexts has been fleshed out through a range of work that addresses the ways in which objects may take on particular meanings and values. For example, there is research that has involved developing techniques to try to elucidate a language or grammar of exhibitions (chapters 17 and 32); or to distinguish different kinds of visual – or multi-sensorial – regimes (chapters 16, 21, and 31). Some of the newer work has also tried to move beyond predominantly text-based models in order to understand the significance of the materiality of objects and, indeed, of forms of exhibiting themselves (chapters 2, 13, and 18); and to explore how this interacts with notions such as “heritage,” “authenticity,” “narrative,” and “memory” (chapters 3, 7, and 13). Further study has considered how these may play out in different cultural or political contexts (chapters 10 and 28) and has addressed questions of the legal status and ethical implications of how objects are treated (chapters 26 and 27). There has also been a move toward looking at the meanings of museum objects not only as a reflection of changing contexts or the perceptions of different groups, but as themselves helping to shape how various other kinds of objects – and, indeed, a complex of related notions, including subjectivity, knowledge, and art – are apprehended and valued (chapters 4, 6, and 16).

Expansion and Specificity

The new museological broadening of remit, and in particular its attention to matters of commerce, market, and entertainment, has also continued and become further developed in the expanded museum studies. Some such work follows from the recognition that “museological” practices (for example, collecting, assembling heritage, performing identity via material culture) are not necessarily confined to the museum, and that the museum may shape ways of seeing beyond its walls. This has also seen further scholarly attention given to some of the historical ideas about what constitutes a museum (chapter 8) and its links with other institutions, such as world fairs (chapter 9).

At the same time, there has been empirical and theoretical work dedicated to trying to understand the (sometimes subtle) implications for museums of the various and changing financial and governmental contexts in which they operate. As chapters here variously document, these include such matters as the effort put into attracting commercial sponsorship or maximizing visitor numbers, the relative amount of space allocated to the display of objects or to the museum shop, the numbers of staff working on different museum tasks and their expected levels of expertise (chapter 25), the ways in which the museum audience is conceptualized (for example, as child or adult, as customer or citizen), the kinds of looking or learning that are encouraged, and how challenging or controversial exhibitions are likely to be. By providing a greater range of studies of what is going on in museums in various places, the new museum studies are also able to highlight some of the alternatives available. For example, Bruno S. Frey and Stephan Meier’s discussion of museum economics in chapter 24 shows various possible options and gives attention to the agency of museum directorates – agency that sometimes may feel rather depleted when certain ways forward come to be taken for granted rather than critically interrogated (chapter 33).

What also emerges – perhaps initially apparently paradoxically – from this broadening of scope and the recognition of overlap between the museum and other institutions is an acknowledgment of the relative specificity or distinctiveness of museums. As with the move beyond approaches that look at museums as texts, there is greater recognition in the expanding museum studies of the necessity to extend, reconfigure, or even move beyond, approaches that have been developed primarily for the study of other institutions or practices, and to find ways of recognizing aspects of museums that might otherwise be overlooked. To take the case of museum economics as the example again, Frey and Meier argue that while many conventional economic concepts can be used to provide insights into the economic situation of museums, the “cultural value” of museums – typically ignored – should also be included in the analysis.

Similar arguments are also evident in a range of other areas in the Companion, such as education, the profession, and technology. In making these, contributors are not seeking to essentialize the museum or identify the only aspects that are really important but to put these together with other features in order to better understand the complex and often diverse nature of museums themselves. Museums, whatever family resemblances they have with other institutions or practices, are also a particular kind of mix, drawn from a partially shared repertoire of ambitions, histories, structures, dilemmas, and practices. It is for this reason that museum studies cannot just be dissolved into, say, media studies or cultural studies, however much museum studies may profit from plundering those areas for insights.

A note here is perhaps necessary on the use of the singular and plural forms “museum” and “museums.” It has become a rather standardized and sometimes hackneyed move in cultural studies to reject the use of singular terms and to use plurals. In choosing to talk of “museum studies” rather than “museology,” I have also given preference to a plural term – which seemed appropriate in this context and given the argument made. As Mieke Bal (chapter 32) argues in relation to the term “the public,” however, a singular term does not necessarily have to indicate an entity understood as undifferentiated. Moreover, it can be helpful to use the singular, especially to indicate where an abstract idea (which may be variously realized) rather than specific instances are intended. For this reason, the term “the museum” is used in the Companion – as well as, where appropriate, “museums.”

The Plural Public

The third of my suggested indicative areas of the new museology was that of the museum audience/public/visitors. As Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s contribution (chapter 22) here shows especially, the amount of work dedicated to trying to understand how museums and exhibitions may be perceived or otherwise related to by those who go to them – and also, though this remains under-addressed, by those who do not – has expanded greatly since The New Museology was published. Not only has there been an expansion of the quantity of visitor research, but a greater range of methodological approaches – particularly qualitative – has also been brought to bear.

Some of the predominant methodological developments are bound up too with changes in the way that “the audience” or “the public” is understood – both by those conducting the research and by museums themselves. As is argued in many chapters in this Companion, there has been a shift, underway for quite some time now though still only patchily achieved, toward understanding the public as diverse, plural, and active, rather than as a relatively homogeneous and rather passive mass (see, for example, chapters 2, 8, and 19). This is evident not only in styles of research, which have increasingly involved methods that allow variations and ways of seeing beyond pre-defined research frames to come to light, but also in the approaches of some museums themselves (for example, chapters 16 and 20).

What is also evident, however, is a more critical take on some of the ways in which aspects of the new orthodoxy of visitor sovereignty – and various linked ideas, such as “accessibility,” “diversity,” “community,” “interactivity,” “visitor involvement” – have been understood or put into practice. There is plenty of evidence of this more critical approach throughout this volume. It is important to note, however, that for the most part the aim of those producing such critical analyses is to contribute to, rather than to abandon, the original ambition to find better ways of helping museums to relate to diverse audiences. Take, for example, Andrea Witcomb’s (chapter 21) dissection of “interactivity” in museums – something that too often is reduced to a rather mechanistic approach; or Mieke Bal’s (chapter 32) analysis of a range of exhi-bitionary attempts to alter the relationship between the museum and the public. In both cases, as in many others discussed in this Companion, they are also concerned to identify more promising strategies and to suggest possible ways forward.

Policy, Practice, and Provocation

All of the developments in museum studies outlined here have significant implications for museum policy and practice. They provide not only more nuanced theoretical tools but also methodological techniques and a growing and more robust empirical base of research and critical accounts of existing museum practice. What this adds up to, I suggest, is a reconnecting of the critical study of the museum with some of those “how to” concerns that the “new museology” saw itself as having superseded.

This reconnection is not only evident on paper: it is also underway in many museums, though to varying extents in different places and in different types of museum. What it involves is a greater openness on the part of museums and museum staff to engage with those who study museums but who do not necessarily work in them. Pioneering directors and curators want to know what some of the exciting critical disciplinary and trans-disciplinary ideas can say to help them create innovative exhibitions. My own sense is that this is coming to supplant the idea, common over the past decade (though more so in some countries and types of museum than in others), that market research on visitors is the panacea for the museum’s ills. While understanding what might be wanted by visitors – and those who do not visit – is crucial to the successful museum enterprise, simply playing back what visitors might think that they already wish to see, tends to produce uninspired and quickly dated exhibitions.