The Poetic Museum: Reviving Historic Collections - Softcover

Spalding, Julian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3791326783 ISBN 13: 9783791326788

Publisher: Prestel, 2002

Synopsis

Hard to Find book

About this title

Review

...a polemical study...immensely readable, entertaining and lively-just the book for anybody interested in the way cultures are collected and represented. -- The Bookseller, April 5, 2002

A counter-blast to the monstrous regiment of bureaucrats entrenched on the moral high ground of the ideological battlefields that museums...have become. -- Galleries, May 1, 2002

Asks vital questions about our museums. -- The Daily Telegraph

Extraordinarily global, exceptionally non-partisan. -- The Times Literary Supplement

He's at it again with...The Poetic Museum, which puts a rocket up many of the world's most hallowed institutions. -- Sunday Herald, March 31, 2002

Passionate, intelligent and amusing...provides...many positive suggestions for museums to combat that feared slide into narrowness and mediocrity. -- Galleries, May 1, 2002

Spalding's examination of...museums is no doubt contentious, but...just plain right...a plea for 'looking' and a gauntlet thrown down to curatorial imagination. -- Scotland on Sunday, April 21, 2002

Synopsis

In the rush to modernize, this book argues, some museums have replaced almost all their collections with interactive exhibits and computers, while others have put everything they can on display, turning their museums into pastiche cabinets of curiosity. Author Julian Spalding maintains that both approaches devalue visiting museums and galleries. The frontiers of knowledge, he argues, are no longer collectible as they were during the Enlightenment, when museums became a central way of understanding natural and human history. Using examples as varied as the Louvre in Paris, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, the State Museum of Political History in St Petersburg and the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore, Spalding illustrates how to use objects and artefacts to create profound and poetic insights into the past. Writing for the visitor as well as the professional, Spalding investigates every aspect of museum work from collecting to financing, buildings to displays, revealing entrenched habits which must be reformed to reach a wider and increasingly sophisticated public.

Most importantly, Spalding describes how his own ideal, the Poetic Museum, would transform traditional museums and greatly extend their audiences. Jonathan Spalding has served as director of numerous museums in Great Britain, most recently Glasgow Museums and Galleries. He is the founder of such award-winning museums as the Ruskin Gallery, the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, and the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prestel
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 3791326783
• ISBN 13: 9783791326788
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192