Do Museums Still Need Objects?
Do Museums Still Need Objects?
STEVEN CONN
Series: The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America
Copyright Date: 2010
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Pages: 272
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fh6rd
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Book Info
Do Museums Still Need Objects?
Book Description:

"We live in a museum age," writes Steven Conn in Do Museums Still Need Objects? And indeed, at the turn of the twenty-first century, more people are visiting museums than ever before. There are now over 17,500 accredited museums in the United States, averaging approximately 865 million visits a year, more than two million visits a day. New museums have proliferated across the cultural landscape even as older ones have undergone transformational additions: from the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan in New York to the High in Atlanta and the Getty in Los Angeles. If the golden age of museum-building came a century ago, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Field Museum of Natural History, and others were created, then it is fair to say that in the last generation we have witnessed a second golden age. By closely observing the cultural, intellectual, and political roles that museums play in contemporary society, while also delving deeply into their institutional histories, historian Steven Conn demonstrates that museums are no longer seen simply as houses for collections of objects. Conn ranges across a wide variety of museum types-from art and anthropology to science and commercial museums-asking questions about the relationship between museums and knowledge, about the connection between culture and politics, about the role of museums in representing non-Western societies, and about public institutions and the changing nature of their constituencies. Elegantly written and deeply researched, Do Museums Still Need Objects? is essential reading for historians, museum professionals, and those who love to visit museums.

eISBN: 978-0-8122-0165-9
Subjects: History
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. [i]-[vi])
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. [vii]-[vii])
  3. Introduction: Thinking about Museums
    Introduction: Thinking about Museums (pp. 1-19)

    We live in a museum age.

    At the turn of the twenty-first century more people are going to more museums than at any time in the past, and simultaneously more scholars, critics, and others are writing and talking about museums. The two phenomena are almost certainly related, but it does not seem to be a happy relationship. Even as museums enjoy more and more success—measured at the gate, in philanthropic giving, and in the cultural influence they command—many who write about them express varying degrees of foreboding.

    I think the New York Times was right when it proclaimed...

  4. Chapter 1 Do Museums Still Need Objects?
    Chapter 1 Do Museums Still Need Objects? (pp. 20-57)

    In the introduction I visited briefly the politics of museums, or more properly the political lenses through which scholars have viewed museums. Here, I want to move from that abstract level to the most specific and basic component of the museum: the object. The purpose of this chapter is to sketch what happened to objects in different kinds of museums throughout the twentieth century.

    Though the definition of what a museum can be has grown elastic over the last generation, according to the AAM objects are what they all have in common. The organization’s Code of Ethics for Museums notes...

  5. Chapter 2 Whose Objects? Whose Culture? The Contexts of Repatriation
    Chapter 2 Whose Objects? Whose Culture? The Contexts of Repatriation (pp. 58-85)

    In the previous chapter I charted the changing—that is, diminishing—role of objects in different museums across the twentieth century. In this chapter I extend that discussion and observe that the museums built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were conceived of as great encyclopedias of knowledge and great storehouses of objects. They were built for and around great collections: art pieces, anthropological artifacts, natural history specimens. Museums were the end result and logical extension of a process of collecting, classifying, and cataloguing that defined much of the scientific outlook of the nineteenth century. A century later,...

  6. Chapter 3 Where Is the East?
    Chapter 3 Where Is the East? (pp. 86-137)

    Three years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his literary history The Flowering of New England, Van Wyck Brooks followed it up with a sequel. New England: Indian Summer told the story of American literature between the Civil War and the First World War, albeit as the title suggests, this version centered on New England. In setting the stage for his literary characters, Brooks noted that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “Oriental art was the vogue among Bostonians” and remarked that “they were filling the region with their great collections.” He made an interesting distinction among these...

  7. Chapter 4 Where Have All the Grown-Ups Gone?
    Chapter 4 Where Have All the Grown-Ups Gone? (pp. 138-171)

    When the Wellcome Collection of scientific and medical artifacts opened in its new London digs in June 2007, seventy-nine-year-old Nobel Prize winner James Watson—of Watson and Crick fame—was present as a guest of honor. Looking out at the new exhibits in their new building, Watson took the occasion to chide American museums: “We have a large number of fine art museums, [but] we don’t have the equivalent number of science museums so congratulations.” He wasn’t finished: “The United States is a disgrace. There is not a first-rate science museum in the whole country.”¹

    That would seem an extraordinary...

  8. Chapter 5 The Birth and the Death of a Museum
    Chapter 5 The Birth and the Death of a Museum (pp. 172-196)

    In 2003, wrecking crews arrived on Civic Center Boulevard in Philadelphia and began demolishing the Municipal Auditorium, which had opened in 1931 with much fanfare for its size and for its art deco elegance. Over the years, the auditorium had played host to any number of events, including national party conventions—in 1948 all three major parties, Democrat, Republican, and Progressive, nominated their presidential candidates there—trade shows, and high school graduations. The Beatles played the auditorium in 1964. The city had more or less mothballed the place by the 1990s, however, when a new convention center opened, designed to...

  9. Chapter 6 Museums, Public Space, and Civic Identity
    Chapter 6 Museums, Public Space, and Civic Identity (pp. 197-232)

    On November 11, 2006, the art world woke up to the shocking news that Thomas Jefferson University, a venerable and distinguished medical school and research center in Philadelphia, planned to sell The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins. It would have been a stunning announcement under any circumstance, but the price—$68 million—and the buyer, a strange and never thoroughly explained partnership between the National Gallery and a Wal-Mart heiress—sent many people in the cultural world reeling.

    On the face of it, this was a story of irresponsible cultural stewardship, naked greed, and shameless opportunism. Alice Walton was building...

  10. Notes
    Notes (pp. 233-256)
  11. Index
    Index (pp. 257-260)
  12. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. 261-262)
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