Module Description (Updated 08 May 2018)
This series of lectures and seminars focuses on the museum and its changing modes of display. It charts the history of the public museum from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. We will explore classic types of museums and their respective display rhetorics. The broader, underlying questions concern narrative and memory. What stories does the museum tell, what does it remember and how? We are used to being presented with a history of art history when we go to the art museum. But rarely do we pay attention to the rhetoric of that narrative or to the political ends it may serve. In addition to looking at the art museum, the series will also consider the representation of nature and other cultures and of larger and different histories such as emigration, war, slavery or the holocaust. How well is the museum equipped to present these? And how does it do that? And finally we will ask: what is the museum's future in the virtual age?
This series of lectures and seminars focuses on the museum and its changing modes of display. It charts the history of the public museum from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. We will explore classic types of museums and their respective display rhetorics. The broader, underlying questions concern narrative and memory. What stories does the museum tell, what does it remember and how? We are used to being presented with a history of art history when we go to the art museum. But rarely do we pay attention to the rhetoric of that narrative or to the political ends it may serve. In addition to looking at the art museum, the series will also consider the representation of nature and other cultures and of larger and different histories such as emigration, war, slavery or the holocaust. How well is the museum equipped to present these? And how does it do that? And finally we will ask: what is the museum's future in the virtual age?
- Module Supervisor: Ana Bilbao Yarto
- Module Supervisor: Gavin Grindon