Download or read book The Return of Curiosity written by Nicholas Thomas and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spy Museum, the Vacuum Cleaner Museum, the National Mustard Museum—not to mention the Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Getty Center: museums have never been more robust, curating just about everything there is and assuming a new prominence in public life. The Return of Curiosity explores museums in the modern age, offering a fresh perspective on some of our most important cultural institutions and the vital function they serve as stewards of human and natural history. Reflecting on art galleries, science and history institutions, and collections all around the world, Nicholas Thomas argues that, in times marked by incredible insecurity and turbulence, museums help us sustain and enrich society. Moreover, they stimulate us to think in new ways about our world, compelling our curiosity and showing us the importance of understanding one another. Thomas looks at museums not simply as storehouses of old things but as the products of meaningful relationships between curators, the public, history, and culture. These relationships, he shows, don’t always go smoothly, but they do always offer new insights into the many ways we value—and try to preserve—the world we live in. The result is a refreshing and hopeful look at museums as a cultural force, one that, by gathering together paintings, tropical birds, antiques, or even our own bodies, offers an illuminating reflection of who we are.

Download or read book Chinese Export Watercolours written by Craig Clunas and published by Victoria & Albert Museum. This book was released on 1984 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet written by Georg Eberhard Rumpf and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: G. E. Rumphius, also known as the "Indian Pliny," was one of the great tropical naturalists of the seventeenth century. Born in Germany, he spent most of his life in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, stationed on the island of Ambon in eastern Indonesia. He wrote two major works; this one, the first modern work on tropical fauna, was published posthumously in Dutch in 1705. A classic text of natural history, it is now available in English for the first time. The descriptions in The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet cover the gamut of organisms found in the seas surrounding Ambon--crabs, shrimp, sea urchins, mussels--as well as minerals and rare concretions taken from animals and plants. A series of exquisite etchings accompanies the descriptions. The book has been masterfully translated and extensively annotated by E. M. Beekman, whose introduction provides the first biography of Rumphius in English that incorporates new material.

Download or read book Collecting The Globe written by George H. Schwartz and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book African Vodun written by Suzanne Preston Blier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-03-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout, Blier pushes African art history to a new height of cultural awareness that recognizes the complexity of traditional African societies as it acknowledges the role of social power in shaping aesthetics and meaning generally.

Download or read book The Copeland Collection written by William Robert Sargent and published by Peabody Essex Museum. This book was released on 1991 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Copeland Collection of 134 Chinese and Japanese ceramic figures, perhaps the most important assemblage of its kind still in private hands, is recognized internationally for the superb quality of its many rare forms. Acquired by Mrs. Lammot du Pont Copeland over the past fifty years, each of these beautifully modeled human and animal figures testifies to the unerring eye of a premiere collector.The majority of these figures are of porcelain, produced during the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, principally for export to the West. Each individual piece displays the meticulous artistry, the marvelous enameling, and the animation and wit characteristic of this remarkably innovative period in ceramic history However modest in scale, many are important works of art.--Amazon.com.

Download or read book Merchant in Asia written by E. M. Jacobs and published by Leiden University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For much of its two centuries of existence (1602 to 1799), the VOC, the Dutch East India Company was the largest trading company in the world. Although the VOC was established to operate primarily as a trading company, it soon also came to play a prominent military, diplomatic and political role on the Asian stage and eventually it laid the foundations of the Dutch colonial empire in the Indonesian Archipelago. Merchant in Asia is the first study to pay attention to the full breadth and width of the VOC commercial activities in Asia. It looks at the company from the peak of its fame until its final decline at the end of the eighteenth century. The study focuses on the main trade goods - spices, Indian textiles, Chinese tea and Javanese coffee - and their specific by-products. Els Jacobs has analyzed in detail the VOC trade in fifteen of the most important commodities that together made up 85% of the total turnover. This innovative study is based on extensive research of the VOC archives and many other Dutch sources, as well as a detailed quantitative analysis of the VOC bookkeeping records. In the study the author sketches in vivid detail how the merchants of the VOC sold, bought, and even supervised the production of tropical products and how they dealt with Asian suppliers and consumers. In addition, she looks at the range of problems the merchants encountered in the maritime trade from Yemen and Persia in the West to China and Japan in the East, including India, Ceylon, Malacca, and the Indonesian Archipelago.

Download or read book Trading Identities written by Ruth Bliss Phillips and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indians in northeastern North America produced a variety of art objects for sale to travelers and tourists during the 18th and 19th centuries. This art is of high quality and great aesthetic interest, but has been largely ignored by scholars. This study combines fieldwork, art historical analysis,

Download or read book From Kabul to Kolkata written by Marcus Fraser and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Africa in Europe Antiquity into the age of global expansion written by Stefan Goodwin and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa in Europe, in two volumes, is an interdisciplinary work about Europeans that demonstrates fluid boundaries and connections between them and Africans from antiquity until the present. Written by a scholar with expertise that includes anthropology, social history, and international relations, the subject matter of this fascinating work ranges from science to art and invites much new thinking about racism, territoriality, citizenship, and frontiers in a world that is increasingly globalized.

Download or read book Africa in Europe Vol 2 written by Stefan Goodwin and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: