Available from http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/volumes/volume-10-2012
Contents
Engaging Strangeness in the Art Museum: an audience development strategy / Jane Deeth
Abstract
What is the public art museum's role in enhancing hesitant viewers' engagement with contemporary art, especially its more challenging and conceptual aspects? In considering this question, the notion that contemporary art is too difficult for general audiences to engage with directly is refuted. It is suggested that the capacity for viewers to make sense of contemporary art, understood as the discursive practices that have come to the fore since the 1960s, is hindered not by the art but by the art theory that hesitant viewers employ. As representational and formalist aesthetic codes remain the dominant modes of responding to art, for the art museum to become more inclusive, there needs a greater emphasis on discursive approaches to experiencing art. From an examination of claims made across disciplines that advocate discursive practice, including George Hein's constructivist museum, Helen Illeris's performative museum and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic conversation, a strategy for the enhancement of the experience of contemporary art for the hesitant or disconnected viewer is proposed that involves reorienting the role of the public art museum from expert speaker to expert listener.
Key words: constructivist museum, art museum education, art interpretation, audience engagement, audience development
A cross-cultural perspective on musealization: the museum's reception by China and Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century / Chang Wan-Chen
Abstract
Historically museums emerged in the West and were subsequently taken up by people in other regions of the world, including the Far East, where the museum was adopted with alacrity by Japanese and Chinese intellectuals. This article explores how China and Japan imagined museums when they first encountered them in the West. It sketches how intellectuals in these two nations began to conduct 'musealization', and suggests that the museum in China and Japan was a product of appropriation of Western formats that was, however, deeply influenced by traditional attitudes to cultural preservation and display.
Key words: Musealization, Cross-cultural perspective, Museums in Japan, Museums in China.
Independent Museums, Heritage, and the Shape of Museum Studies / Fiona Candlin
Abstract:
Reflecting on the British heritage debates of the 1980s and 1990s, Robert Lumley asserted that they continue to influence Anglo-American definitions and perceptions of that subject. This article suggests that they had a correlative impact upon the parameters of museum studies. The museums founded during the 1980s were mainly small scale enterprises and they were devoted to many different topics, but commentators almost exclusively focused on the large independent organisations concerned with the recent industrial past. In doing so they associated the independent sector with 'heritage' rather than with established public museums. I maintain that this remains the case. Recent scholarship either considers independent museums in relation to the conceptual framework of the period or in terms of 'community', a discourse that is closely linked to recent developments in heritage studies. They are rarely, if ever, mentioned in analyses of architecture, professional practice, contemporary display or the role of museums. This omission effectively ascribes expertise and knowledge to public rather than independent institutions, bmaintains ingrained structures of social and cultural exclusion, and homogenises museum studies, limiting its concerns and scope.
Key words: heritage, museum studies, community, independent
'Educative leisure' and the art museum / Laurie Hanquinet and Mike Savage
Abstract
This paper argues that although museums have increasingly changed their mission to embrace 'spectacular' and 'commercial' goals in recent decades, their audiences resist this redefinition of the museum's role. Based on a structural equation model derived from a survey of 1,900 visitors of the six main galleries of modern and contemporary art in Belgium, it shows that different kinds of visitors tend to share the same conceptualization of what museums signify, as a kind of 'educative leisure'. They continue to differentiate museums from more commercial forms of leisure, and associate them with schooling and educational processes. We demonstrate that this appreciation of 'educative leisure' is shared by visitors from different socio-demographic backgrounds and is affected by other dimensions of the visitors' profiles, such as the practice of creative activities or recent experiences of other art places (commercial galleries, fairs, contemporary art centers).
Keywords: art museums, visitors, leisure, image
Gender and material culture: Review Article / Alexandra Bounia
Book Reviews
Amy Jane Barnes, Manon Parry, Mark O'Neill, Graham Black
Â
