In a world of growing risk aversion, one could be forgiven for thinking that risk doesn’t make sense. Risk elimination thinking and behaviour sets a trajectory for a ‘dumb down’ workplace culture. The more efforts are made to ‘engineer out the idiot’, the more the system creates an unthinking workforce.A Newsletter in 2011 by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the UK lists a number of things that have been banned. Dodgem cars, school sack races and kite flying, amongst the ac...

Museum and art galleries have never been so much in the news as they have been over the past decade. Yet public focus at both professional and non-specialist levels has been remarkable for what has been accidentally or deliberatley left out of recent debates. Moving beyond the narrow issues of professional practice, Museums 2000 probes the political, economic and cultural realities which affect museums today. Because the contributos are drawn from the museum profession and the wid...

A step-by-step guide to every aspect of putting on an art exhibition, with tips from a range of influential curators.The Curator’s Handbook is the essential handbook for curators and curatorial students, mapping every stage of the process of putting on an exhibition, no matter how traditional the venue, from initial idea to final installation.An introduction explores curatorial work from its origins in the seventeenth century onward and outlines th...

The international controversy over who "owns" antiquities has pitted museums against archaeologists and source countries where ancient artifacts are found. In his book Who Owns Antiquity?, James Cuno argued that antiquities are the cultural property of humankind, not of the countries that lay exclusive claim to them. Now in Whose Culture?, Cuno assembles preeminent museum directors, curators, and scholars to explain for themselves what's at stake in this struggle--and why...

Learning in the Museum examines major issues and shows how research in visitor studies and the philosophy of education can be applied to facilitate a meaningful educational experience in museums.Hein combines a brief history of education in public museums, with a rigorous examination of how the educational theories of Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky and subsequent theorists relate to learning in the museum.Surveying a wide range of research methods employed in visitor stud...

This handbook provides the definitive guide to commissioning contemporary art. Every step and stage is revealed and demystified from the initial invitation to an artist to the financing of a project, from the drafting of contracts to the final siting and installation of works, from the care and preservation of commissioned pieces to their interpretation and publicity. Combining theoretical and conceptual considerations with practical ones, Buck and McCleans lively and instructive text is s...

Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, asks “How can we prepare ourselves to reach the generation of digital natives who bring a huge appetite—and aptitude—for the digital world?” He explains how the Smithsonian is tackling this issue in Best of Both Worlds: Museums, Libraries, and Archives in a Digital Age.Libraries and archives have already made many documents available through the Internet. The digital world presents a bigger challenge for museums; prod...

How does a city and a nation deal with a legacy of perpetrating atrocity? How are contemporary identities negotiated and shaped in the face of concrete reminders of a past that most wish they did not have?Difficult Heritage focuses on the case of Nuremberg – a city whose name is indelibly linked with Nazism – to explore these questions and their implications. Using an original in-depth research, using archival, interview and ethnographic sources, it provides not only fasci...

The influence of digital media on the cultural heritage sector has been pervasive and profound. Today museums are reliant on new technology to manage their collections. They collect digital as well as material things. New media is embedded within their exhibition spaces. And their activity online is as important as their physical presence on site.However, ‘digital heritage’ (as an area of practice and as a subject of study) does not exist in one single place. Its evidence base is c...

Museum Exhibition is the only textbook of its kind to consider exhibition development using both theory and practice in an integrated approach. This comprehensive study covers care of exhibits, writing accompanying text, using new technology, exhibition evaluation, administration and content for a wide range of collections. It provides a complete outline for all those concerned with providing displays in museums and other cultural heritage contexts.

This volume examines the implications and consequences of the idea of ‘intangible heritage’ to current international academic and policy debates about the meaning and nature of cultural heritage and the management processes developed to protect it. It provides an accessible account of the different ways in which intangible cultural heritage has been defined and managed in both national and international contexts, and aims to facilitate international debate about the meaning, nature and val...

This sensitive and compelling biography sheds new light on John Singer Sargent’s art through an intimate history of his family. Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman focus especially on his niece and muse, Rose-Marie Ormond, telling her story for the first time. In a score of paintings created between 1906 and 1912, John Singer Sargent documented the idyllic teenage summers of Rose-Marie and his own deepening affection for her serene beauty and good-hearted, candid charm. Rose-Marie married Ro...