Description
Book SynopsisAn ambitious study of what it means to be a museum in the twenty-first century
In Museums Inside Out, Mark W. Rectanus investigates how museums are blurring the boundaries between their gallery walls and public spaces. He examines how artists are challenging and changing museums, taking readers deep into new experiments in exhibition making. Along the way, Rectanus offers insights about how museums currently exemplify the fusion of the creative and digital economies.
Exploring contemporary museum practices, initiatives, and collaborations, Rectanus analyzes projects like the Collective Museum, which foster land-based museum ecologies by co-curating with local communities. The Schirn Kunsthalle, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, and Tate Modern reflect museums as cultural zones for performance, inside and outside the museum. In addition, he studies a joint project between the Van Gogh Museum and the investment firm Deloitte Luxembourg, extracting insights on the transfer of expertise from museums to the financial sector.
Wide-ranging in its case studies, and boldly putting museum studies and art into conversation, Museums Inside Out delivers vital insights into the ideas and places that museums are creating in contemporary culture.
Trade Review"Museums Inside Out introduces a new vocabulary to understand the place of artists in redefining and contesting the museum in the context of globalization and the creative economy. This groundbreaking book is necessary reading for anyone seeking to understand the directions of travel of museums and of contemporary art in an age of accelerated mobility."—Michelle Henning, author of Museums, Media and Cultural Theory
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Moving Out
1. Rethinking Museums
2. Museums Inside Out: Mapping Cultural Memory
3. Cartographies of Urban Space and Performance
4. Datascapes and Landscapes
5. Museums and the Creative Economy: Soft Power, Financialization, and Activism
6. Coda: Museum Futures and Speculations
Notes
Index
