Product Description: Are national galleries different from other kinds of art gallery or museum? What value is there for the nation in a collection of international masterpieces? How are national galleries involved in the construction national art? National Galleries is the first book to undertake a panoramic view of a type of national institution – which are sometimes called national museums of fine art – that is now found in almost every nation on earth...read more

Product Description: Since the late nineteenth century, museums have been cited as tools of imperialism and colonialism, as strongholds of patriarchalism, masculinism, homophobia and xenophobia, and accused both of elitism and commercialism. But, could the museum absorb and benefit from its critique, turning into a critical museum, into the site of resistance rather than ritual? This book looks at the ways in which the museum could use its collections, its cultural authority, its auratic space and resources to give voice to the underprivileged, and to take an active part in contemporary and at times controversial issues...read more

Product Description: Stop curating! And think what curating is all about. This book starts from this simple premise: thinking the activity of curating. To do that, it distinguishes between 'curating' and 'the curatorial'. If 'curating' is a gamut of professional practices for setting up exhibitions, then 'the curatorial' explores what takes place on the stage set up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator...read more

Product Description: 'Western European Museums and Visual Persuasion' is an assessment of the visual persuasiveness of art museums. It demonstrates that museums are as capable of influence as speeches or advertisements are and that an awareness of this influence provides an insight into museums' cultural roles...read more

Product Description: Art museums have emerged in recent decades as the most vibrant and popular of all cultural institutions. Though art museums have never been more popular, their direction and values are now being contested as never before—both in the media and in the art world itself...read more

Product Description: Museums After Modernism is a unique collectionthat showcases the ways questions about the museum go to the heart of contemporary debates about the production, consumption and distribution of art. The book features expert artists, curators and art historians who grapple with many of the vibrant issues in museum studies, while paying homage to a new museology that needs to be considered...read more

Product Description: This reflection on the unlikely search for an invisible masterpiece takes on a near-imposible quest. But not in vain--it provides an excuse to consider the very idea of collecting and its limits, while remaining open to doubt and pleasure...read more

Product Description: Public Art acknowledges the trend among contemporary museums to promote participatory and processual exhibition strategies meant to elicit subjective experience. At the same time it valorizes the object-oriented tradition that has long differentiated museums from other institutions similarly committed to public service and the perpetuation of cultural values...read more

Product Description: By juxtaposing issues and problems, Donald Preziosi's latest collection of essays, In the Aftermath of Art, opens up multiple interpretive possibilities by bringing to the surface hidden resonances in the implications of each text...read more

Product Description: What begins as a meditation on "the museum" by one of the world's leading art historians becomes, in this book, a far-reaching critical examination of how art history and museums have guided and controlled not only the way we look at art but the ways in which we understand modernity itself...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Museums display much more than artifacts; Museum Culture makes us on a tour through the complex of ideas, values and symbols that pervade and shape the practice of exhibiting today. Bringing together a broad range of perspectives from history, art history, critical theory and sociology, the contributors to this new collection argue that museums have become a central institution and metaphor in contemporary society...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Bringing together contributors from a broad range of perspectives from history to critical theory, this book argues that museums have become an institution and metaphor in contemporary society.

Product Description: A collection of 15 essays addressing the nature and purpose, in today's society, of the museum. The contributors see the museum as a cultural force in itself - exhibiting general characteristics of human understanding and values.