A01=Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
agency of display
anthropology
art
Author_Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
bad taste
Category=AB
Category=GLZ
Category=JBCC
Category=KNSG
cultural anthropology
cultural production
cultural studies
destination museum
discovery
ellis island
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
ethnology
exhibiting jews
festivals
good taste
heritage
historical recreations
historical trends
human performance
jewish self representation
kitsch
memorials
museums
object performance
objects
paintings
plimoth plantation
techniques of display
tourism
tourist attractions
worlds fair
Product details
- ISBN 9780520209664
- Weight: 862g
- Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 05 Sep 1998
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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"Destination Culture" takes the reader on an eye-opening journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch. Posing the question, 'What does it mean to show?' Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores the agency of display in a variety of settings: museums, festivals, world's fairs, historical re-creations, memorials, and tourist attractions. She talks about how objects - and people - are made to 'perform' their meaning for us by the very fact of being collected and exhibited, and about how specific techniques of display, not just the things shown, convey powerful messages. Her engaging analysis shows how museums compete with tourism in the production of 'heritage'. To make themselves profitable, museums are marketing themselves as tourist attractions. To make locations into destinations, tourism is staging the world as a museum of itself. Both promise to deliver heritage. Although heritage is marketed as something old, she argues that heritage is actually a new mode of cultural production that gives a second life to dying ways of life, economies, and places.
The book concludes with a lively commentary on the 'good taste/bad taste' debate in the ephemeral 'museum of the life world,' where everyone is a curator of sorts and the process of converting life into heritage begins.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Professor of Performance Studies and of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.
