Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum

There is much more to museums than the documenting, monumentalizing or theme-parking of identity, history and heritage. This anthology aims to make strange the very existence of museums and to plot a critical, historical and ethical understanding of their origins and history. A radical selection of key texts introduces the reader to the intense investigation of the modern European idea of the museum that has taken place since the 1950s. Texts first published in journals and books are brought together in one volume with up-to-the-minute and specially commissioned pieces by leading administrators, curators and art historians. The selections are organized by key themes that map the evolution of the debate and are introduced by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago.

Table of Contents:
General introduction - What are museums for?. What are museums for? Creating historical effects: Introduction; The fictions of factual representation, Hayden White; Psychoanalysis and its history, Michel De Certeau; Rome, the archetypal museum and the Louvre, the negation of division, Jean-Louis Deotte; The poetics of the museum - Lenoir and Du Sommerard, Stephen Bann; Telling objects - A narrative perspective on collecting, Mieke Bal. What are museums for? Instituting evidence: Introduction; Collective memory and memoria rerum, Mary Carruthers; Science-honour-metaphor - Italian cabinets of the 16th and 17th century, Giuseppe Olmi; Natural history and the emblematic world view, William N. Ashworth Jr; The museum - Its classical etymology and Renaissance genealogy, Paula Findlen; Inventing Assyria - Exoticism and reception in 19th-century England and France, Frederick N. Bohrer. What are museums for? Building shared imaginaries/effacing otherness: Introduction; Double visions, Homi Bhabha; Teddy bear patriarchy - Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936, Donna Haraway; From princely gallery to the public art museum - The Louvre Museum and the National Gallery, London, Carol Duncan; Museums and the formation of national and cultural identities, Annie E. Coombes; Creating identity - Exhibiting the Philippines at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Beverly K. Grindstaff; Performing identity - The museal framing of Nazi ideology, Sandra Esslinger; The cosmic theme park of the Javanese, Shelly Errington; What are museums for? Observing subjects, disciplining practice: Introduction; Introduction - Museum without walls, Andre Malraux; Of other spaces, Michel Foucault; Power/knowledge - constructed space and the subject, Paul Q. Hirst; Museums - Managers of consciousness, Hans Haacke; The exhibitionary complex, Tony Bennett; Orientalism and the exhibitionary order, Timothy Mitchell; China in Britain - The Imperial collections, Craig Clunas. What are museums for? Secularizing rituals: Introduction; The museum of modern art as late capitalist ritual - An iconographical analysis, Carol Duncan, Alan Wallach; Animals as cultural signs - Collecting animals in 16th-century Medici Florence, Claudia Lazzaro; Remarks on the collection of Rudolf II - The Kunstkammer as a form of representation, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann; Philip Hainhofer and Gustavus Adolfus's Kunstschrank in Uppsala, Hans-Olof Bostrom; Museums in 18th-century Rome, Francis Haskell, Nicholas Penny; The genesis and early development of the Royal Museum in Stockholm - A claim for authenticity and legitimacy, Magnus Olausson, Solfrid Soderlind; The cultural logic of the late capitalist museum, Rosalind Krauss; Collision, Neil Cummings, Marysia Lewandowska. What are museums for? Inclusions and exclusions - Representing adequately: Introduction; Cultural reflections, Moira Simpson; Histories of the tribal and the modern, James Clifford. (Part contents).