Anti-Museum charts the development of the anti-museum as a concept and as it has been realised in practice. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the New Museum and PS1 in New York, Mona in Australia, Art42 in Paris and Donald Judd’s Marfa, the book assesses their potential to engage museum publics in new ways. Anti-museums seek to breathe relational and theatricalised vitality into the objects they exhibit, by connecting them to the contexts of their making, to their social life outside the museum, to visitors' lives via their transformative capacities for change, and by being a place of dialogue, exchange and transformation, rather than instruction. Documenting the ways in which they have been created by artists, collectors, and curators, the book also examines the extent to which anti-museums connect with other museums through the exchange of values and resources. Critically, it asks whether, after some 40 years of ‘new museology’, such institutions are still able to offer something fresh and valuable. Anti-Museum provides a sharp and incisive account of the anti-museum as it has been imagined, realised and experienced, and as it has relevance for understanding and working in the contemporary museum world. As such, the book will be of great interest to scholars and students engaged in the study of museums, cultural economy, inclusive urban regeneration, the democratisation of art and contemporary art. It should also appeal to museum professionals around the world.

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In Righting America at the Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., take readers on a fascinating tour of the museum. The Trollingers vividly describe and analyze its vast array of exhibits, placards, dioramas, and videos, from the Culture in Crisis Room, where videos depict sinful characters watching pornography or considering abortion, to the National Selection Room, where placards argue that natural selection doesn't lead to evolution. The book also traces the rise of creationism and the history of fundamentalism in America.

Usually the term 'innovation' is used in connection with artists' and authors' themes and techniques. What we see in most studies about innovation is that its problematic aspects are related to problems in literary or artistic history and that scholars try to solve those problems in work-oriented research. Some scholars, however, especially emperical sociologists, claim that problems with respect to innovation cannot be solved without analyzing the cultural area where those problems arise. The major question that this book discusses concerns the role of art committees, literary, art and film critics, art collectors, museum directors, academic writers and other 'gatekeepers' with regard to different forms of art in the interbellum period as well as after World War II.

As we are approaching our fin de siecle, issues of time and memory haunt contemporary culture. Museums and memorials are being constructed rapidly, as if there were no tomorrow. Contemporary art and literature focuses on memory and the past, rather than claiming radical breakthroughs into some unknown future. With the recent resurgence of nationalism and issues of national identity, the political future, too, seems to fold itself back into the past rather than offering a bold vision of the 21st century. The great paradox of our fin de siecle culture is that novelity is even more associated with memory and the past rather than future expectation. But if the obsession with memory is one salient symptom in this age of a modernity grown old, then cultural and political amnesia is undoubtedly its counterpoint. Rather than blaming amnesia on television or the school, Twilight Memories argues that the danger of amnesia is inherent in the information revolution. Our obsessions withcultural memory can be read as re-representing a powerful reaction against the electronic archive and they mark a shift in the way we live structures of temporality. In this book, the media are the hidden veil through which the author looks at the problem of cultural memory and an emerging new sensibility of temporality in literature, art, politics, media theory and the museum.

Repackage of a classic sociology text in which the author developes the idea of resistance to social and economic pressures.

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