Overview

In the last decade, museums all around the world have been reinventing themselves. They are now much more than scholarly, cultural archives. A remit to reach out to a broader public, the increasing politicization of the ownership and curation of objects, the architectural expectations of new buildings, the requirements of the ""event exhibit""...all have changed the way any new museum is built, operates and serves its public purpose. Museums now reflect global economics and local politics. New museums now shape our public culture.Illustrated with a very wide range of museums and museum spaces - from MOMA in New York to the reconstruction of Ground Zero, from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC to the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, from the planned renewal of the Crystal Palace site in London to the Sendai Mediatheque in Japan - the book reveals how the new museum is evolving as a cross-disciplinary, self-consciously political, and often avowedly self-reflexive institution.

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9781845204549

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'Kylie Message insightfully reappraises the workings of 'new museums' as social sites at which the past, the present, and future can be continuously contested and created in complex cultural struggles over national and personal identity. Global in scope, historical by design, and local on purpose, her wide-ranging analysis is an important contribution to contemporary debates about museum studies and cultural criticism.' Timothy W. Luke, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University 'For all the explosion in the (inter)discipline of museology, Message does nevertheless manage to offer her readers something distinctively (dare one say it?) 'new'. This book is by no means the first to demonstrate how museums function as agents and instruments of social recognition, reconciliation and restitution, as the extensive references and bibliography testify. But Message is among a minority of scholars who prove able and willing to combine conceptual analsysis with practical demonstratio Through her thorough and inquisitive research, Message is encouraging us to step back and analyse what these new museums are truly accomplishing, inspiring us to take the initiative to work through the rhetoric and develop museum practice that is truly inclusive and representative of our multicultural communities. Christa Lohman, Journal of Museum Ethnography

'Kylie Message insightfully reappraises the workings of 'new museums' as social sites at which the past, the present, and future can be continuously contested and created in complex cultural struggles over national and personal identity. Global in scope, historical by design, and local on purpose, her wide-ranging analysis is an important contribution to contemporary debates about museum studies and cultural criticism.' Timothy W. Luke, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University 'For all the explosion in the (inter)discipline of museology, Message does nevertheless manage to offer her readers something distinctively (dare one say it?) 'new'. This book is by no means the first to demonstrate how museums function as agents and instruments of social recognition, reconciliation and restitution, as the extensive references and bibliography testify. But Message is among a minority of scholars who prove able and willing to combine conceptual analsysis with practical demonstration

Author Information

Kylie Message is ARC Special Research Centre Research Fellow and Convener of the Museums and Collections graduate program at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, the Australian National University.

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