Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations [Paperback]

Gustavo Buntinx (Editor), Ciraj Rassool (Editor), Corinne Kratz (Editor), Lynn Szwaja (Editor), Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (Editor), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Editor), Ivan Karp (Editor), Christine Mullen Kreamer (Contributor), Cuahtemoc Camarena (Contributor), Fath Davis Ruffins (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 7, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0822338947 | ISBN-13: 978-0822338949

Museum Frictions is the third volume in a bestselling series on culture, society, and museums. The first two volumes in the series, Exhibiting Cultures and Museums and Communities, have become defining books for those interested in the politics of museum display and heritage sites. Another classic in the making, Museum Frictions is a lavishly illustrated examination of the significant and varied effects of the increasingly globalized world on contemporary museum, heritage, and exhibition practice. The contributors—scholars, artists, and curators—present case studies drawn from Africa, Australia, North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Together they offer a multifaceted analysis of the complex roles that national and community museums, museums of art and history, monuments, heritage sites, and theme parks play in creating public cultures.

Whether contrasting the transformation of Africa’s oldest museum, the South Africa Museum, with one of its newest, the Lwandle Migrant Labor Museum; offering an interpretation of the audio guide at the Guggenheim Bilbao; reflecting on the relative paucity of art museums in Peru and Cambodia; considering representations of slavery in the United States and Ghana; or meditating on the ramifications of an exhibition of Australian aboriginal art at the Asia Society in New York City, the contributors highlight the frictions, contradictions, and collaborations emerging in museums and heritage sites around the world. The volume opens with an extensive introductory essay by Ivan Karp and Corinne A. Kratz, leading scholars in museum and heritage studies.

Contributors. Tony Bennett, David Bunn, Gustavo Buntinx, Cuauhtémoc Camarena, Andrea Fraser, Martin Hall, Ivan Karp, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Corinne A. Kratz, Christine Mullen Kreamer, Joseph Masco, Teresa Morales, Howard Morphy, Ingrid Muan, Fred Myers, Ciraj Rassool, Vicente Razo, Fath Davis Ruffins, Lynn Szwaja, Krista A. Thompson, Leslie Witz, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Museum Frictions is a landmark publication which decenters the Western-centric bias of the existing literature. It shifts critical museology into a new register by challenging readers to think about the multiple ways that the globalization of a Western institution is transforming not only the dynamics of social interaction around the world but also the institutional nature of the museum itself.”—Ruth B. Phillips, coeditor of Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture

“Museum Frictions is not just a worthy successor to the preceding volumes Exhibiting Cultures and Museums and Communities, but a major leap forward. In the face of dramatic changes in the museum world during the past fifteen years, the last two volumes still remain a major platform for framing debate. I am confident that Museum Frictions will provide a similar service for the next fifteen.”—Doran H. Ross, Director Emeritus of the Fowler Museum at UCLA

“Just as Exhibiting Cultures and Museums and Communities set the agenda for museum debate over the last decade, Museum Frictions sets the agenda for the next. This is a wonderful book that must be read by anybody with an interest in museums, their transformations, dilemmas, challenges, politics, and futures.”—Sharon Macdonald, editor of A Companion to Museum Studies

“This marvelous and broad-ranging compendium by an eminent group of scholars provides a thinking person’s guide to contemporary museum work. It tackles the philosophical issues curators, directors, and professionals face in the art of cultural representation. How do you get the world’s diverse people to talk to each other in meaningful and significant ways? This book provides the intellectual tools for doing so, dealing cogently and adeptly with the complexity of globalization, conflicting perspectives, and the noise proffered by popular media. For a long book with large themes, it reads amazingly well.”—Richard Kurin, Director of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution

About the Author

Ivan Karp is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship at Emory University. He has coedited numerous books, including Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture and Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display.

Corinne A. Kratz is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship at Emory University. She is the author of The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition.

Lynn Szwaja is Program Director for Theology at the Henry Luce Foundation.

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto was, until retirement in 2005, Associate Director for Creativity and Culture at the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1998, he was awarded the Joseph Henry Medal for “exemplary contributions to the Smithsonian Institution.”

Product Details

• Paperback: 632 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (December 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822338947
• ISBN-13: 978-0822338949
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #194,873 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The "Friction" is Academic, March 13, 2007

By 

Nw MT Historical Society "Executive Director" (Kalispell, Montana, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (Paperback)

While I found a few gems and insights, this 600-plus page tome needed a good book editor to boil it down to maybe 200 pages. It appears a bunch of noted academics were trying to appear, well, academic, and they succeeded. Single sentences the length of paragraphs, simple words with superfluous suffixes added--I kept saying to myself, "just say it already--stop trying to impress me with how you can bury a simple point in a massive flood of verbage." I reccommend the first book in this series, "Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display" (1991) as being much more accessible and helpful.