The Banality of Everyday Consumption: Collecting Contemporary Urban Materiality (original) (raw)
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This Time It’s Personal: City Museums and Contemporary Urban Life
City History, Culture, Society, 2017
The CAMOC conference that took place in Berlin in 2011, with its theme“Participative Strategies in Capturing the Changing Urban World,” is partof a larger discussion that museums in general—and city museums in particular—have been having recently about our collections and whether theyare serving our current needs. We have been assessing our collections—whatwe own versus what we wish we owned—and we are noticing a disconnect.Most of our collections were formed at the turn of the twentieth century, andwe’re having a lot of trouble making them fit the stories we want to tell aboutour cities here in the twenty-first century. So, we’re experimenting with contemporarycollecting, and participatory collecting, in an attempt to make ourcollections more inclusive and more representative. This is important workand we need to do more of it.
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Collecting the contemporary is hot. More and more cultural museums look beyond their walls and go out into the street searching for contemporariness. This transformation towards an open and audience-centred institution is still far from complete. Many museums face certain obstacles and issues on this journey. In my talk I would like to focus on three of these issues, seen from the perspective of a cultural scientist. The talk ends by discussing the concept of the Imagined City.
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Cities embrace and express cultural, social and ideological agendas that are central to urban experience Cities are structured to orchestrate particular relationships between people and place, creating routines of movement, spectacle and memory. Throughout history, settlements have been formed around individual iconic buildings that codify meaning, which is either deliberately constructed or construed by the observer. The contemporary city has increasingly represented a paradox between two positions. On the one hand urban environments are being reordered to support the social life of cities, and on the other they are driven the need to engage with the global economy, corporatisation and international tourism. Brett Steel argues that this has led to a condition of 'hypervisuality', which has created a shift from 'place making to promotion and place marketing.'Museums have become a key part of this processes, with contemporary museum architecture frequently traded as a...
The paper examines the spectacle of contemporary forms of advertising and product placements techniques in the context of urban environments (including the phenomenon of the so called 'brand city').This is an 'over-exposed city', to use Virilio's terminology, a city penetrated by media and advertising, a topical manifestation of what Guy Debord called the 'Society of the Spectacle'. The paper juxtaposes to the above well rehearsed critical scenarios an examination of several urban art projects that attempt to design an image of the city as a locus of convergence, creativity and citizenship. There is a powerful visual language at work in the contemporary city, one that operates beyond the phantasmagoria of consumption. Inspired by the Situationists' intent to stimulate permanent social dynamics in the city through playful interventions based on integration between art and technology, such projects show the ability of individuals and social groups to appropriate and co-create urban space. It remains to be seen, though whether such playful interventions bring about new viable conceptions of the public sphere or, conversely, whether their impact is similar, in its ineffectuality, to that of the Situationist precursors.
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The body of the museum visitor has become key for examining power relationships, behavioural practice and theory within exhibition spaces in recent decades. Since the 1980s, the emergence of a postmodern worldview has required museums to seem more socially relevant, reflexive and inclusive, especially with regard to the overcoming of modern bodily dualisms through interactive exhibitions. By exploring the transition of societies from modernity to postmodernity and beyond this article aims to explore first the emergence of a dualistic perception of the body and subsequently whether the emergence of postmodern museums hails the end of said dualisms. The article will then address the impact that a growing consumer culture has on museum practice and ultimately prove that consumption problematizes the postmodern exercise to liberate the self from its dual existence.
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The theoretical and ethical debate fostered by the reflexive turn of the last decades is increasingly guided by the concern to recover a sphere of political action of the museum: activist and decolonial in nature, deeply entangled in the world and built from an intraactive engagement with it. As a consequence, the museum tends to address the emergent and the urgent through situated practices that collectively analyse and respond to circumstances in the world. In doing so, the contemporary museum seeks to create conditions for visitor engagement by empowering their unmediated voices to be heard. This text aims to explore the critical space between the apparent decolonial vitality of the museum and how diffractive practices may be designed in a postcritical and postrepresentational context, arguing that approaches based on artistic and design processes of speculative fabulation (as Design Culture) are helpful for thinking and acting in these spaces of experience, acting as a tool of philosophical enquiry, which promotes responsiveness to «know» and «do» differently in the present. Pragmatically, it highlights three modes of speculative (moderated) design engagement with the present and the future to help museums to break out of their ontological blindness and fulfil their critical and transformative potential.