Quality: D.C.'s Museum of the Bible and Aesthetic Evaluation (original) (raw)

Seeing is Believing: U.S. Imperial Culture and the Jerusalem Exhibit of 1904

Studies in American Jewish Literature, 2016

What are the historical proximities and parallels linking Jews and Muslims in U.S. imperial culture? What are the technologies of knowledge production that make and make sense of these connections, and what are their effects? The Jerusalem Exhibit at 1904’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis offers a generative site through which to consider these questions. The exhibit included hundreds of “native” Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants, and exemplified a national covenantalism at the interface of U.S. settler colonialism and imperial rule. Visuality played a key role in staging and naturalizing racial difference between and among these various “natives,” even as its will towards transparency was routinely thwarted. While such overdetermined pedagogical labor never satisfied the predilections of American imperial authority, by the end of the exhibit’s run, it also served as an impetus to express political Zionism’s desires for Jewish nation-state status commensurate with other political formations organizing the World’s Fair.

Jewish children's museum: a virtual roundtable on material religion

Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 2007

Tarter is Aj.fisi 'if .•\fitfi.T-.fv';[> ^.' in 'n BicoWyri, Ntr// VorK. n, CofinecllciK iritwGiH .iscjt ot Scxiiology al Qtioens iiJntvtirsitvof t^iw'tbrt*.-L:ijra KtrehenWati-CilrTitiletl s UiilvGraily Professor and Prafesseif of ParioirnaoKe SiinAss at (he Ttach Schooi cl Ihu Arts. '^<)v:^!''iMvi) is a 'MTIW ariO constiitant, aixl has lussum fifi>graf(is iw •Arilien last lor •^w&ily&!(iHt3«ta<vs l-te is the author ol '<^ boote, I '••«>'Isoturw oo wittixi li' :!'JfiwnshG^il•• •• He : '.-rate The Jewish Children's Museum in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which opened in December 2004, is a project of the Lubavitcher Hasidic community. In the process of adapting museological techniques-cutting-edge multimedia, environmental installation, gigantic rituai objects, hands-on and interactive activities-to the materializing of religion, the museum has developed a distinctive museology. The nature of that museology-precisely how it materializes religion and addresses the dilemmas that arise in the slippage between showing, demonstrating, and doing-is the subject of this roundtabte.

Experiential design and religious publicity at D.C.'s Museum of the Bible

The Senses and Society, 2020

This article examines the sensory dimension of religious publicity, focused on the case of an evangelical museum in the United States. Washington D.C.’s Museum of the Bible (MOTB) was envisioned and funded primarily by conservative Protestants, and is a revealing case of religion in public life because most of the creative labor of design was conceived and executed by secular firms who do not typically work for faith-based clients. The professional expertise of these firms, “experiential design,” informs a sea change in contemporary museology and the expansion of the experience economy in late modernity. Ultimately, I argue that MOTB’s engagement with experiential design indexes the power of entertainment in late modern life, as the sensory repertoire at play operates with largely unquestioned legitimacy and presumed efficacy. By mobilizing the cultural capital of design, an evangelical museum makes a claim for diverse audiences in a deeply public setting.