Illustrated with over fifty photos, Civilizing Rituals merges contemporary debates with lively discussion and explores central issues involved in the making and displaying of art as industry and how it is presented to the community. Carol Duncan looks at how nations, institutions and private individuals present art , and how art museums are shaped by cultural, social and political determinants. Civilizing Rituals is ideal reading for students of art history and museum studies, and professionals in the field will also find much of interest here.

Illustrated with over fifty photos, Civilizing Rituals merges contemporary debates with lively discussion and explores central issues involved in the making and displaying of art as industry and how it is presented to the community. Carol Duncan looks at how nations, institutions and private individuals present art , and how art museums are shaped by cultural, social and political determinants. Civilizing Rituals is ideal reading for students of art history and museum studies, and professionals in the field will also find much of interest here.

This book considers the material conditions in which the production and consumption of art takes place, looking at how art is presented to the community and how art museums are shaped by cultural, social and political determinants.

Using examples of indigenous models from Indonesia, the Pacific, Africa and native North America, Christina Kreps illustrates how the growing recognition of indigenous curation and concepts of cultural heritage preservation is transforming conventional museum practice. Liberating Culture explores the similarities and differences between Western and non-Western approaches to objects, museums, and curation, revealing how what is culturally appropriate in one context may not be in another. For those studying museum culture across the world, this book is essential reading.

Debating the practices of museums, galleries, and festivals, Exhibiting Cultures probes the often politically charged relationships among aesthetics, contexts, and implicit assumptions that govern how art and artifacts are displayed and understood. The contributors—museum directors, curators, and scholars in art history, folklore, history, and anthropology—represent a variety of stances on the role of museums and their function as intermediaries between the makers of art or artifacts and the eventual viewers.

The Pyramids and the Taj Mahal are witness to the extravagant architectural tributes that, throughout human history, the great and the wealthy have paid to their dead. In this book, a well-known architectural historian provides a history of funerary architecture in western Europe from the earliest megalithic tombs of prehistory to the establishment of public cemeteries in the nineteenth century. With sensitivity and wit, Howard Colvin traces the ways in which these structures represent changing ideas about the after-life as well as changes in architectural style.

In Exhibiting Contradiction, a leading scholar considers the way art museums have depicted--and continue to depict--American society and the American past. In closely focused and often controversial essays, Alan Wallach explores the opposing ideologies that drove the development of the American art museum in the nineteenth century and the tensions and contradictions characteristic of recent museum history.