Spectacle and Display

In the ten years since Carol Duncan′s Civilising Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (1995), public and scholarly interest in the way that art and the visual have been displayed and are presented has increased enormously. This volume brings the discussions up to date. Leading international scholars and younger researchers address issues such as museum display, collecting, the creation of visual spectacles, institutional histories, curatorial strategies, cultural exclusion and definitions of heritage. Exploring a variety of cultural contexts and historical periods, this benchmark collection addresses specific displays and notable objects alongside the politics of spectacle and questions of audience.

1. Spectacle and Display: Setting the Terms ( Deborah Cherry and Fintan Cullen).

2. Artists′ Pages (Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska).

3. Empathetic Vision: Looking at and with a Performative Byzantine Miniature (Robert S. Nelson).

4. A Faceless Society? Portraiture and the Politics of Display in Eighteenth–century Rome (Sabrina Norlander Eliasson).

5. Laying Siege to the Royal Academy: Wright of Derby′s View of Gibraltar at Robins′s Rooms, Covent Garden, April 1785 (John Bonehill).

6. ′Walking for Pleasure′? Bodies of Display at the Manchester Art–Treasures Exhibition in 1857 (Helen Rees Leahy).

7. Museum Studies Now (Andrew McClellan).

8. The Logic of Spectacle c. 1970 (Angus Lockyer).

9. Display at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 1968 1975 (Peter Funnell).

10. Narratives of Display at the National Gallery, London (Charles Saumarez Smith).

11. ′Our Gods, Their Museums′: the Contrary Careers of India′s Art Objects (Tapati Guha–Thakurta).

Notes on Contributors.

Index.

Deborah Cherry is Professor of Contemporary and Modern Art at the University of Amsterdam.

Fintan Cullen is Professor of Art History at the University of Nottingham.

"International experts and new researchers dissect centuries of museum exhibition which breathes fresh perspective .Insights on individual displays allow for deeper examinations of such issues as collecting institutional history and defining heritage." ( Museum News, November 2008)