Contemporary Collecting: Theory and Practice

Contemporary Collecting: Theory and Practice PDF Author: Owain Rhys
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781910144312
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This is a revised colour edition of this acclaimed book, which deals with the problems of collecting contemporary objects in museums and aims to answer some of the awkward questions raised. What should we collect? Who should decide? How can we adequately record how we live our lives today? What about the storage implications? What limits should we place on ourselves? What processes and directives can ensure best practice? "Owain Rhys reminds us that contemporary collecting is the first and most significant act of interpretation and a primary responsibility of almost every museum." - David Anderson, Director General, National Museum Wales. "The contemporary moment is the moment in which to collect, effectively. But overwhelmed by diverse recording media, unsure of an appropriate collecting philosophy or fieldwork practice, and facing up to globalisation and mass production, most museums have recorded that moment as a silence. Owain Rhys gives timely reflection on the development of contemporary collecting practice, and considers how museums might face up to the challenge." - Professor Simon Knell, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.

Contemporary Collecting: Theory and Practice

Contemporary Collecting: Theory and Practice PDF Author: Owain Rhys
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781910144312
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is a revised colour edition of this acclaimed book, which deals with the problems of collecting contemporary objects in museums and aims to answer some of the awkward questions raised. What should we collect? Who should decide? How can we adequately record how we live our lives today? What about the storage implications? What limits should we place on ourselves? What processes and directives can ensure best practice? "Owain Rhys reminds us that contemporary collecting is the first and most significant act of interpretation and a primary responsibility of almost every museum." - David Anderson, Director General, National Museum Wales. "The contemporary moment is the moment in which to collect, effectively. But overwhelmed by diverse recording media, unsure of an appropriate collecting philosophy or fieldwork practice, and facing up to globalisation and mass production, most museums have recorded that moment as a silence. Owain Rhys gives timely reflection on the development of contemporary collecting practice, and considers how museums might face up to the challenge." - Professor Simon Knell, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.

Collecting the Contemporary

Collecting the Contemporary PDF Author: Owain Rhys
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781910144282
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 623

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Book Description
Many history museums collect contemporary objects, stories, images and sounds. But reasoned collecting strategies and policies are often lacking. The sheer quantity of available material culture and the complexity of contemporary life leave many confused about how best to document and engage with the present. Collecting the Contemporaryaddresses one of the most fundamental issues facing today's history museums: why and how to engage with contemporary collecting? In a format which is approachable, attractive - and above all actionable, this handbook is packed with stimulating thinking and international case studies from some of the leading practitioners and thinkers in the field. This overview of contemporary collecting in a social historical context is well overdue. Original source material, ideas, developments and research have never before been brought together in a single volume.

Ethics of Contemporary Collecting

Ethics of Contemporary Collecting PDF Author: Jen Kavanagh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040156576
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Ethics of Contemporary Collecting addresses pressing and pertinent issues around ethical contemporary collecting, reflecting on how practices are evolving or in flux. Across three sections, each containing live sector subjects from the climate crisis to digital collecting to centring communities, this book collates a combination of case studies and in-depth chapters by leading practitioners working in the field. These pieces are instructive and provide practical, transferable examples of how people have approached these challenges. It highlights examples of leading practice in the field and illustrates ethical approaches to contemporary collecting as work in this area progresses and our conversations about it advance. To reflect this ongoing growth, the book closes with an ‘Activations’ section of discussion prompts intended to keep the conversations and progress – on individual, institutional and societal levels – going. Ethics of Contemporary Collecting is an indispensable tool for informing, training and educating the next generation of curators and collection professionals, and inspiring future collecting projects.

Contemporary Collecting

Contemporary Collecting PDF Author: Kevin M. Moist
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 081089114X
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
While the importance of collections has been evident in the sciences and humanities for several centuries, the social and cultural significance of collecting practices is now receiving serious attention as well. As reflected in programs like Antiques Roadshow and American Pickers, and websites such as eBay, collecting has had a consistent and growing presence in popular culture. In tandem with popular collecting, institutions are responding to changes in the collecting environment, as library catalogs go online and museums use new technologies to help generate attendance for their exhibits. In Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices, and the Fate of Things, Kevin M. Moist and David Banash have assembled several essays that examine collecting practices on both a personal and professional level. These essays situate collectors and collections in a contemporary context and also show how our changing world finds new meaning in the legacy of older collections. Arranged by such themes as “Collecting in a Virtual World,” “Changing Relationships with Things,” “Collecting and Identity—Personal and Political,” and “Collecting Practices and Cultural Hierarchies,” these essays help illuminate the role of objects in our lives. Covering a breadth of interdisciplinary perspectives and subjects—from PEZ candy dispensers and trading cards to sports memorabilia and music—Contemporary Collecting will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, anthropology, popular culture studies, sociology, art history, and more.

Extreme Collecting

Extreme Collecting PDF Author: Graeme Were
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857453645
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
By exploring the processes of collecting, which challenge the bounds of normally acceptable practice, this book debates the practice of collecting ‘difficult’ objects, from a historical and contemporary perspective; and discusses the acquisition of objects related to war and genocide, and those purchased from the internet, as well as considering human remains, mass produced objects and illicitly traded antiquities. The aim is to apply a critical approach to the rigidity of museums in maintaining essentially nineteenth-century ideas of collecting; and to move towards identifying priorities for collection policies in museums, which are inclusive of acquiring ‘difficult’ objects. Much of the book engages with the question of the limits to the practice of collecting as a means to think through the implementation of new strategies.

A Companion to Museum Studies

A Companion to Museum Studies PDF Author: Sharon Macdonald
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444357948
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 598

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Book Description
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

Collecting: An Unruly Passion

Collecting: An Unruly Passion PDF Author: Werner Muensterberger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400863473
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
From rare books, valuable sculpture and paintings, the relics of saints, and porcelain and other precious items, through stamps, textiles, military ribbons, and shells, to baseball cards, teddy bears, and mugs, an amazing variety of objects have engaged and even obsessed collectors through the ages. With this captivating book the psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger provides the first extensive psychological examination of the emotional sources of the never-ending longing for yet another collectible. Muensterberger's roster of driven acquisition-hunters includes the dedicated, the serious, and the infatuated, whose chronic restlessness can be curbed--and then merely temporarily--only by purchasing, discovering, receiving, or even stealing a new "find." In an easy, conversational style, the author discusses the eccentricities of heads of state, literary figures, artists, and psychoanalytic patients, all possessed by a need for magic relief from despair and helplessness--and for the self-healing implied in the phrase "I can't live without it!" The sketches here are diverse indeed: Walter Benjamin, Mario Praz, Catherine the Great, Poggio Bracciolini, Brunelleschi, and Jean de Berry, among others. The central part of the work explores in detail the personal circumstances and life history of three individuals: a contemporary collector, Martin G; the celebrated British book and manuscript collector Sir Thomas Phillipps, who wanted one copy of every book in the world; and the great French novelist Honoré de Balzac, a compulsive collector of bric-a-brac who expressed his empathy for the acquisitive passions of his collector protagonist in Cousin Pons. In addition, Muensterberger takes the reader on a charming tour of collecting in the Renaissance and looks at collecting during the Golden Age of Holland, in the seventeenth century. Throughout, we enjoy the author's elegant variations on a complicated theme, stated, much too simply, by John Steinbeck: "I guess the truth is that I simply like junk." Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture

Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture PDF Author: Christie Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317160878
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
This groundbreaking book is the first to provide a critical overview of the relationship between contemporary ceramics and curatorial practice in museum culture. Ceramic objects form a major part of museum collections, with connections to anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines that engage with the cultural and social history of humankind. In recent years museums have provided the impetus for cutting-edge artistic practice, either as a response to particular collections, or as part of exhibitions. But the question of how museums have staged contemporary ceramics and how ceramic artists respond to museum collections has not been the subject of published research to date. This book examines how ceramic artists have, over the last decade, begun to animate museum collections in new ways, and reflects on the impact that these new initiatives have had in the broad context of visual culture. Ceramics in the Expanded Field is the culmination of a three-year AHRC funded project, and reflects its major findings. It brings together leading international voices in the field of ceramics, research undertaken throughout the project and papers delivered at the concluding conference. By examining the benefits and constraints of interventions and the dialogue between ceramics and museological practice, this book will bring focus to an area of museology that has not yet been theorized, and will contribute to policy debates and art practice.

Collecting as Modernist Practice

Collecting as Modernist Practice PDF Author: Jeremy Braddock
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421403641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
In this highly original study, Jeremy Braddock focuses on collective forms of modernist expression—the art collection, the anthology, and the archive—and their importance in the development of institutional and artistic culture in the United States. Using extensive archival research, Braddock's study synthetically examines the overlooked practices of major American art collectors and literary editors: Albert Barnes, Alain Locke, Duncan Phillips, Alfred Kreymborg, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Katherine Dreier, and Carl Van Vechten. He reveals the way collections were devised as both models for modernism's future institutionalization and culturally productive objects and aesthetic forms in themselves. Rather than anchoring his study in the familiar figures of the individual poet, artist, and work, Braddock gives us an entirely new account of how modernism was made, one centered on the figure of the collector and the practice of collecting. Collecting as Modernist Practice demonstrates that modernism's cultural identity was secured not so much through the selection of a canon of significant works as by the development of new practices that shaped the social meaning of art. Braddock has us revisit the contested terrain of modernist culture prior to the dominance of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the university curriculum so that we might consider modernisms that could have been. Offering the most systematic review to date of the Barnes Foundation, an intellectual genealogy and analysis of The New Negro anthology, and studies of a wide range of hitherto ignored anthologies and archives, Braddock convincingly shows how artistic and literary collections helped define the modernist movement in the United States. -- John Xiros Cooper, The University of British Columbia

Cultures of Collecting

Cultures of Collecting PDF Author: Roger Cardinal
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 186189421X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This book traces the psychology, history and theory of the compulsion to collect, focusing not just on the normative collections of the Western canon, but also on collections that reflect a fascination with the "Other" and the marginal – the ephemeral, exotic, or just plain curious. There are essays on the Neoclassical architect Sir John Soane, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Schwitters, one of the masters of collage. Others examine imperialist encounters with remote cultures – the consquitadors in America in the sixteenth century, and the British in the Pacific in the eighteenth – and the more recent collectors of popular culture, be they of Swatch watches, Elvis Presley memorabilia or of packaging and advertising. With essays by Jean Baudrillard, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Nicholas Thomas, Mieke Bal, John Forrester, John Windsor, Naomi Schor, Susan Stewart, Anthony Alan Shelton, John Elsner, Roger Cardinal and an interview with Robert Opie.