Download or read book Collecting in Contemporary Practice written by Susan M. Pearce and published by SAGE Publications Limited. This book was released on 1998-03-23 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This clear and lively book provides an illuminating analysis of collecting as a major social and individual phenomenon in contemporary society. The book is based on the understanding of collecting practice, rather than the collections themselves. It highlights the significance of collecting in relation to the cultural process, popular culture, contemporary attitudes to material culture and the idea of collecting as a postmodern activity. Susan Pearce presents both quantitative and qualitative information from a broad spectrum of contemporary collectors and relates their collecting to broader issues of consumption, gender, family and social class. Accessible and original, Collecting in Contemporary Practice will be of

Download or read book Collecting in Contemporary Practice written by Susan Pearce and published by SAGE Publications Limited. This book was released on 1998-03-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This clear and lively book provides an illuminating analysis of collecting as a major social and individual phenomenon in contemporary society. The book is based on the understanding of collecting practice, rather than the collections themselves. It highlights the significance of collecting in relation to the cultural process, popular culture, contemporary attitudes to material culture and the idea of collecting as a postmodern activity. Susan Pearce presents both quantitative and qualitative information from a broad spectrum of contemporary collectors and relates their collecting to broader issues of consumption, gender, family and social class. Accessible and original, Collecting in Contemporary Practice will be of

Download or read book Contemporary Collecting written by Kevin M. Moist and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the importance of collections has been evident in the sciences and humanities for several centuries, the social and cultural significance of collecting practices is now receiving serious attention as well. As reflected in programs like Antiques Roadshow and American Pickers, and websites such as eBay, collecting has had a consistent and growing presence in popular culture. In tandem with popular collecting, institutions are responding to changes in the collecting environment, as library catalogs go online and museums use new technologies to help generate attendance for their exhibits. In Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices, and the Fate of Things, Kevin M. Moist and David Banash have assembled several essays that examine collecting practices on both a personal and professional level. These essays situate collectors and collections in a contemporary context and also show how our changing world finds new meaning in the legacy of older collections. Arranged by such themes as “Collecting in a Virtual World,” “Changing Relationships with Things,” “Collecting and Identity—Personal and Political,” and “Collecting Practices and Cultural Hierarchies,” these essays help illuminate the role of objects in our lives. Covering a breadth of interdisciplinary perspectives and subjects—from PEZ candy dispensers and trading cards to sports memorabilia and music—Contemporary Collecting will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, anthropology, popular culture studies, sociology, art history, and more.

Download or read book On Collecting written by Susan Pearce and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Collecting examines the nature of collecting both in Europe and among people living within the European tradition elsewhere. Susan Pearce looks at the way we collect and what this tells us about ourselves and our society. She also explores the psychology of collecting: why do we bestow value on certain objects and how does this add meaning to our lives? Do men and women collect differently? How do we use objects to construct our identity? This book breaks new ground in its analysis of our relationship to the material world.

Download or read book Contemporary Collecting Theory and Practice written by Owain Rhys and published by . This book was released on 2014-09-29 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a revised colour edition of this acclaimed book, which deals with the problems of collecting contemporary objects in museums and aims to answer some of the awkward questions raised. What should we collect? Who should decide? How can we adequately record how we live our lives today? What about the storage implications? What limits should we place on ourselves? What processes and directives can ensure best practice? "Owain Rhys reminds us that contemporary collecting is the first and most significant act of interpretation and a primary responsibility of almost every museum." - David Anderson, Director General, National Museum Wales. "The contemporary moment is the moment in which to collect, effectively. But overwhelmed by diverse recording media, unsure of an appropriate collecting philosophy or fieldwork practice, and facing up to globalisation and mass production, most museums have recorded that moment as a silence. Owain Rhys gives timely reflection on the development of contemporary collecting practice, and considers how museums might face up to the challenge." - Professor Simon Knell, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.

Download or read book Archives Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World written by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting has a long tradition in the Middle East but the museum as a public institution is relatively new. Today there are national museums for antiquities in most Arab countries. While in some cases the political and social climate has hindered the foundation of museums, with existing collections even destroyed at times, the recent museum boom in the Gulf States is again changing the outlook. This unique book is the first to explore collecting practices in archives and museums in the modern Arab world, featuring case studies of collecting practices in countries ranging from Egypt and Lebanon to Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf, and providing a theoretical and methodological basis for future research. The authors are also concerned with investigating the relationship between past and present, since collecting practices tell us a great deal not only about the past but also about the ways we approach the past and present conceptions of our identities. Collections can be textual as well, as in the stories, memories or events selected, recalled, and retold in the pages of a text. As interest in memory studies as well as popular and visual culture grows in the Arab World, so collecting practices are at the heart of any critical approach to the past and the present in that region. The book will be of great interest not only to scholars and students of the modern Arab world but also to professionals in museums and collections in the region, as well as around the world.

Download or read book Extreme Collecting written by Graeme Were and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By exploring the processes of collecting, which challenge the bounds of normally acceptable practice, this book debates the practice of collecting ‘difficult’ objects, from a historical and contemporary perspective; and discusses the acquisition of objects related to war and genocide, and those purchased from the internet, as well as considering human remains, mass produced objects and illicitly traded antiquities. The aim is to apply a critical approach to the rigidity of museums in maintaining essentially nineteenth-century ideas of collecting; and to move towards identifying priorities for collection policies in museums, which are inclusive of acquiring ‘difficult’ objects. Much of the book engages with the question of the limits to the practice of collecting as a means to think through the implementation of new strategies.

Download or read book Collecting as Modernist Practice written by Jeremy Braddock and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-01-18 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly original study, Jeremy Braddock focuses on collective forms of modernist expression—the art collection, the anthology, and the archive—and their importance in the development of institutional and artistic culture in the United States. Using extensive archival research, Braddock's study synthetically examines the overlooked practices of major American art collectors and literary editors: Albert Barnes, Alain Locke, Duncan Phillips, Alfred Kreymborg, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Katherine Dreier, and Carl Van Vechten. He reveals the way collections were devised as both models for modernism's future institutionalization and culturally productive objects and aesthetic forms in themselves. Rather than anchoring his study in the familiar figures of the individual poet, artist, and work, Braddock gives us an entirely new account of how modernism was made, one centered on the figure of the collector and the practice of collecting. Collecting as Modernist Practice demonstrates that modernism's cultural identity was secured not so much through the selection of a canon of significant works as by the development of new practices that shaped the social meaning of art. Braddock has us revisit the contested terrain of modernist culture prior to the dominance of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the university curriculum so that we might consider modernisms that could have been. Offering the most systematic review to date of the Barnes Foundation, an intellectual genealogy and analysis of The New Negro anthology, and studies of a wide range of hitherto ignored anthologies and archives, Braddock convincingly shows how artistic and literary collections helped define the modernist movement in the United States. -- John Xiros Cooper, The University of British Columbia

Download or read book A Companion to Museum Studies written by Sharon Macdonald and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Museum Studies captures the multidisciplinary approach to the study of the development, roles, and significance of museums in contemporary society. Collects first-rate original essays by leading figures from a range of disciplines and theoretical stances, including anthropology, art history, history, literature, sociology, cultural studies, and museum studies Examines the complexity of the museum from cultural, political, curatorial, historical and representational perspectives Covers traditional subjects, such as space, display, buildings, objects and collecting, and more contemporary challenges such as visiting, commerce, community and experimental exhibition forms

Download or read book Collecting the Contemporary written by Owain Rhys and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many history museums collect contemporary objects, stories, images and sounds. But reasoned collecting strategies and policies are often lacking. The sheer quantity of available material culture and the complexity of contemporary life leave many confused about how best to document and engage with the present. Collecting the Contemporaryaddresses one of the most fundamental issues facing today's history museums: why and how to engage with contemporary collecting? In a format which is approachable, attractive - and above all actionable, this handbook is packed with stimulating thinking and international case studies from some of the leading practitioners and thinkers in the field. This overview of contemporary collecting in a social historical context is well overdue. Original source material, ideas, developments and research have never before been brought together in a single volume.

Download or read book Cultures of Collecting written by Roger Cardinal and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2004-09-02 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the psychology, history and theory of the compulsion to collect, focusing not just on the normative collections of the Western canon, but also on collections that reflect a fascination with the "Other" and the marginal – the ephemeral, exotic, or just plain curious. There are essays on the Neoclassical architect Sir John Soane, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Schwitters, one of the masters of collage. Others examine imperialist encounters with remote cultures – the consquitadors in America in the sixteenth century, and the British in the Pacific in the eighteenth – and the more recent collectors of popular culture, be they of Swatch watches, Elvis Presley memorabilia or of packaging and advertising. With essays by Jean Baudrillard, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Nicholas Thomas, Mieke Bal, John Forrester, John Windsor, Naomi Schor, Susan Stewart, Anthony Alan Shelton, John Elsner, Roger Cardinal and an interview with Robert Opie.

Download or read book Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures Record Collecting as a Social Practice written by Dr Roy Shuker and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-01-28 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the history of record collecting; profiles collectors and the collecting process; considers categories—especially music genres—and types of record collecting; and outlines and discusses the infrastructure within which collecting operates. Shuker situates this discussion within the broader literature on collecting, along with issues of cultural consumption, social identity and 'the construction of self' in contemporary society. Record collecting is both fascinating in its own right, and provides insights into broader issues of nostalgia, consumption and material culture.

Download or read book Collecting An Unruly Passion written by Werner Muensterberger and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From rare books, valuable sculpture and paintings, the relics of saints, and porcelain and other precious items, through stamps, textiles, military ribbons, and shells, to baseball cards, teddy bears, and mugs, an amazing variety of objects have engaged and even obsessed collectors through the ages. With this captivating book the psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger provides the first extensive psychological examination of the emotional sources of the never-ending longing for yet another collectible. Muensterberger's roster of driven acquisition-hunters includes the dedicated, the serious, and the infatuated, whose chronic restlessness can be curbed--and then merely temporarily--only by purchasing, discovering, receiving, or even stealing a new "find." In an easy, conversational style, the author discusses the eccentricities of heads of state, literary figures, artists, and psychoanalytic patients, all possessed by a need for magic relief from despair and helplessness--and for the self-healing implied in the phrase "I can't live without it!" The sketches here are diverse indeed: Walter Benjamin, Mario Praz, Catherine the Great, Poggio Bracciolini, Brunelleschi, and Jean de Berry, among others. The central part of the work explores in detail the personal circumstances and life history of three individuals: a contemporary collector, Martin G; the celebrated British book and manuscript collector Sir Thomas Phillipps, who wanted one copy of every book in the world; and the great French novelist Honoré de Balzac, a compulsive collector of bric-a-brac who expressed his empathy for the acquisitive passions of his collector protagonist in Cousin Pons. In addition, Muensterberger takes the reader on a charming tour of collecting in the Renaissance and looks at collecting during the Golden Age of Holland, in the seventeenth century. Throughout, we enjoy the author's elegant variations on a complicated theme, stated, much too simply, by John Steinbeck: "I guess the truth is that I simply like junk." Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book An Anthropology of Contemporary Art written by Thomas Fillitz and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the exciting developments that have occurred in the anthropology of art over the last twenty years, this study uses ethnographic methods to explore shifts in the art market and global contemporary art. Recognizing that the huge diversity of global phenomena requires research on the ground, An Anthropology of Contemporary Art examines the local art markets, biennials, networks of collectors, curators, artists, patrons, auction houses, and museums that constitute the global art world. Divided into four parts – Picture and Medium; World Art Studies and Global Art; Art Markets, Maecenas and Collectors; Participatory Art and Collaboration – chapters go beyond the standard emphasis on Europe and North America to present first-hand fieldwork from a wide range of areas, including Brazil, Turkey, and Asia and the Pacific. With contributions from distinguished anthropologists such as Philippe Descola and Roger Sansi Roca, this book provides a fresh approach to key topics in the discipline. A model for demonstrating how contemporary art can be studied ethnographically, this is a vital read for students in anthropology of art, visual anthropology, visual culture, and related fields.

Download or read book Collecting the New written by Bruce Altshuler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-12 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve distinguished curators discuss the questions & challenges faced by museums in acquiring & preserving contemporary art.

Download or read book Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture written by Christie Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book is the first to provide a critical overview of the relationship between contemporary ceramics and curatorial practice in museum culture. Ceramic objects form a major part of museum collections, with connections to anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines that engage with the cultural and social history of humankind. In recent years museums have provided the impetus for cutting-edge artistic practice, either as a response to particular collections, or as part of exhibitions. But the question of how museums have staged contemporary ceramics and how ceramic artists respond to museum collections has not been the subject of published research to date. This book examines how ceramic artists have, over the last decade, begun to animate museum collections in new ways, and reflects on the impact that these new initiatives have had in the broad context of visual culture. Ceramics in the Expanded Field is the culmination of a three-year AHRC funded project, and reflects its major findings. It brings together leading international voices in the field of ceramics, research undertaken throughout the project and papers delivered at the concluding conference. By examining the benefits and constraints of interventions and the dialogue between ceramics and museological practice, this book will bring focus to an area of museology that has not yet been theorized, and will contribute to policy debates and art practice.

Download or read book Collecting China written by Vimalin Rujivacharakul and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting China is a unique collection of essays that brings together theories of materiality and what collecting has meant to various peoples over time. Collecting China grew out of a simple question: how does a thing become Chinese? Fifteen essays explore this question from different angles, ranging from close examination of world-renowned private collections to critical reinterpretations of historical writings.