Urban narratives: museums as iconic symbols and agents of civic experience (original) (raw)

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.

Cultural infrastructure: urbanising the museum

2018

What does it mean for a museum to be urban? How do you exhibit what a city is? The Museum of London is making plans to leave its purpose-built modernist structure at London Wall and renovate part of the old Smithfield Market as a new facility. As it does so, it has the opportunity to transform its relationship to the city spatially, socially, and culturally. Theatrum Mundi worked together with Museum of London to stimulate a critical debate about the implications of translating a museum of the city from a singular, purpose- built architecture to a plural, pre-existing fabric: in other words, what it means to urbanise the museum.

Cities, museums and soft power

Consumption Markets & Culture, 2016

When you think of a museum, what image comes to mind? Perhaps you think of a specific institution, such as the nearby art museum, historic house, or zoo, with whom you connect onsite or online. Or, perhaps you substitute a metaphora tomb (Adorno 1967), a laboratory (Barr 1939), supermarket, as captured by Andy Warhol, a temple and a forum (Cameron 1971), or a veiled vault (Heyler, Schad, and Beck 2015)in place of a specific entity? How do these references impact our understanding of the function of museums and their histories as well as their futures? Museums began as treasure houses as evidenced by classical Greek examples (the Propylaia included a pinakotheke for the display of paintings), an open-air museum with reconstructed landmarks for the Roman emperor Hadrian, and later displays of Renaissance humanism, eighteenthcentury enlightenment and nineteenth-century nationalism, imperialism, and, on occasion, democracy. While the object was at the forefront of museums, the notions of agency, site, and space have de-centered focus on the object and have brought greater attention to the audience. Specifically, museums have elevated their public service functions, an act that museum theorist Elaine Heumann Gurian suggests "blurs" the boundaries between museums and other public service agencies (2006). Former museum director and audience researcher Bonnie Pitman has further qualified museums by stating: Museums are more than the repositories of the past, with memories and objects both rare and beautiful. Museums are cultural, educational, and civic centers in our communitiescenters for exhibitions, conservation, research, and interpretation; they are theaters and movie houses, job-training programs, schools and day-care centers, libraries and concert halls … forums for their communities. (1999, 1)

Piazzas or Stadiums: Toward an Alternative Account of Museums in Cultural and Urban Development

Over the last twenty-five years or so there has been a 'cultural turn' in urban development strategies. An analysis of the academic literature over this period reveals that the role of new museums in such developments has often been viewed reductively as brands of cultural distinction with economic pump priming objectives. Over the same twenty-five year period there has also been what is termed here a 'libertarian turn' in museum studies and museology.

City Museums and Globalization

DergiPark (Istanbul University), 2013

City museum is a new issue in museology, which has been discussed for a decade. Important discussions have been carried out about the museum and its relationship to the urban environment and urban life, the relationship between the city, society and the museum, and the changing city and society. The changing city is considered in the context of globalization. In the literature, there are several ideas about the relationship between globalization and its impacts on today's cities and societies. On the one hand, globalization is discussed as a negative normalizing process; and on the other hand, it is considered a process of development. Although there are different thoughts on globalization, there is a common approach to the relationship between globalization, city and the city museum, which is that the city museum should display the analogous relationship with the past, present and future.

Another new museum? Imagining the space of art in the creative city

Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 2014

With the transformation of urban governance into a mode of entrepreneurialism, museums have become prominent and privileged sites for reshaping cities as attractive places for cultural and artistic consumption. Using an ethnographic field study, the authors investigate how the logic of the creative city is at work in the planning of a new art museum in a medium-sized Swiss city. The analysis shows how the entrepreneurial rationale is contested and re-appropriated through the use of classic and situational modes to organize this cultural institution. The ways of imagining the museum are described as the effects of these three modes of ordering -entrepreneurial, classic, and situational -as well as their hybridization. The authors conclude that by attending to the multiple layers of urban life, which unfold in and around museums, we can imagine other 'new museums' than those of the entrepreneurial city.

The dilemma of the art museum: reconciling modernity and the new town square

This paper is part of a wider and ongoing study into the nature of the contemporary museum, notably the art museum. In particular it addresses the nature of the museum as a site of communication within the public sphere -that 'domain of common concern' 1 , the agora or commons, describing the place or space in which issues and ideas become the object of critical attention by the citizens of a society. This public sphere, theorized by Jurgen Habermas as a potential site for an idealised 'communicative action', is also the subject of much contention. While I won't go into the detail or the debates around Habermas's theories here, I will acknowledge