From a world in a box to a world without borders: art museums, media technologies and cosmopolitanism

Lists

Henning, Michelle ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3798-7227 (2013) From a world in a box to a world without borders: art museums, media technologies and cosmopolitanism. In: Invited public lecture at the Museum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland, as part of their Universal Museum series, 21 Nov 2013, Łódź, Poland. (Unpublished)

Preview

PDF
FromAWorldInaBox.pdf - Presentation
Download (169kB) | Preview

Abstract

This was an invited lecture given at the Muzeum Sztuki. It addresses the notion of universality in museum practices, in an age of electronic communication, globalisation and artistic multiculturalism. The art museum tasked to be a "universal museum" to map the development of art, historically resorted to the use of reproductions. The paper discusses how the universal museum project relied both on hand-‐made facsimiles and technical reproductions (such as photographs); how we map or visualise a history of modern art, and how the ways in which we do this are related to the media technologies of our time. It considers the idea of the museum as a container (or box) in which all the world’s stuff is stored, and as a kind of narrative journey. Finally it addresses the ways in which the notion of cosmopolitanism has been proposed as an alternative to the perceived Imperial aspects of the universal museum, and briefly comments on the situation today for museums as public spaces in a global context and their responsibility to their publics.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Lecture)
Keywords:	Cosmopolitanism, museums, universal museum, photography, photographic reproduction, modern art, media, facsimile
Subjects:	Arts > Gallery and museum Media > Media history and theory Media > New media and new media theory Media > Photography Arts > Art and design history
Depositing User:	Michelle Henning
Date Deposited:	16 Sep 2017 19:34
Last Modified:	28 Aug 2021 07:24
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/3917

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Actions (login required)

View Item

References

Alexander Alberro. 2013. "A Messier Coherence: Inventing Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art" in Modernism/modernity. 20(2), 371-381.
Benjamin, Walter. 1973. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (1936). In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 219-253.
Belting, Hans. 2001. The Invisible Masterpiece. London: Reaktion Books.
Blanchard, Marc. 2000. "The Dandy and the Commissar: Notes on the History of Culture" MLN, 115(4), 662-689.
Cuno, James (ed.) 2009. Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cuno, James. 2011. Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Duncan, Carol and Wallach, Alan. 1980. "The Universal Survey Museum". Art History 3(4), 448-469
Fisher, Philip.1991. Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Griffiths, Alison. 2003. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Griffiths, Alison. 1996. "Journey for Those Who Can Not Travel': Promenade Cinema and the Museum Life Group". In Wide Angle 18(3), 53-84.
Guilbaut, Serge. 1983. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, David. 2009. Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press.
Haskell, Francis, and Nicholas Penny. 1981. Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Henning, Michelle. 2006. Museums, Media and Cultural Theory. Maidenhead UK: Open University Press.
Henning, Michelle. 2013. With and Without Walls: Photographic Reproduction and The Art Museum. In The International Handbooks of Museum Studies. Online version at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118829059.wbihms996/abstract accessed December 2013.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell. 1859. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.” Atlantic Magazine, June,
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1859/06/the-‐stereoscope-and-the-stereograph/303361/
(accessed January 20, 2013).
Nava, Mica. 2007. Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalization of Difference. London: Berg Press.
Maleuvre, Didier.1999. Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
Malraux, André. 1967. Museum Without Walls. London: Secker and Warburg.
Mazan. Kazamierz. 2011. "National Museums in Poland". In Building National Museums in Europe 1750‐2010. Conference proceedings from EuNaMus, European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Bologna 28-‐30 April 2011. Eds. Peter Aronsson and Gabriella Elgenius. Linköping University Electronic Press: http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp_home/index.en.aspx?issue=064 -‐ Accessed October 2013.
Meyer, Richard. 2013. What Was Contemporary Art? Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press
Papastergiardis, Nikos. 2012. Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Penny, H. Glenn. 2002. Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany. Chapel Hill NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
Sherman, Daniel. 1994. "Quatremère/Benjamin/Marx; Art Museums, Aura and Commodity Fetishism". In Museum Culture: Histories, Discourse, Spectacles. eds. Daniel Sherman and Irit Rogoff. New York: Routledge.

Tools

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)

The University of West London

From a world in a box to a world without borders: art museums, media technologies and cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Downloads

Actions (login required)

Menu