Book Description
Public art museums have become necessary fixtures of every city or country with any claim to importance. Yet we have still to understand what happens in them.
Civilizing Rituals treats art museums from a new perspective--as ritual settings in their own right and as cultural artifacts that are much more than neutral shelters for art.
Drawing from both anthropological and philosophical literature, Carol Duncan begins by exploring the idea of the art museum-as-ritual. She examines specific musuem rituals in the US, Britain and France including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musuem of Modern Art, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre and several donor memorials including the Frick Collection and the Morgan Library, not only in relation to their political and social contexts but also paying close attention to the details of the museum settings themselves.
Duncan illuminates the ways in which musuems engage their visitors in the performance of ritual scenarios and, through them, commmunicate and affirm ideas, values and social identities. Art museums emerge as significant objects of historical and art-historical inquiry, sites on which political power and social interests and the history of cultural forms visibly intersect.
Customer Reviews:
Fantastic.......2007-09-30
The boook was for my academic course..... and I was surprised by the reponse of amazon. They delivered it to me so fast. Thanks a lot. And the quality of the book is good too.....
Book is basically related to museum culture and importance of rituals in those spaces.
Duncan the hateful.......2006-04-10
As the title of Miss Duncan's book suggest, she sees the museums as almost religious institutions that entice the visitor to "enact a performance of some kind". Their very identity and meaning are constructed through this ritualistic practice, which is neither natural nor neutral. In the introduction the author states that she has no ambition in propagating what an art museum should be. In fact she does not indicate if she has such a clear cut ideal thought-out at all. The purpose of her research is to see, decipher and describe. There are, it turns out, two ways - two ideals in fact - a museum is presented to the public: the educational museum and the aesthetic museum. The first type proposes to educate the visitor, treating the exhibits as "art-historical objects", while in the second they are unique, original works of art to be reflected upon by the sophisticated guest, sheltered by the museum. Duncan insists that either way, all this happens in a "ritual-like" atmosphere, and that is what she wants to prove in her book. She deals with this aspect specifically in the first chapter. The older museums were practically all built in a style that consciously copied the architecture of old Greek and Roman temples and were often compared to them. The visitor, already mentally prepared for an enlightening experience, would receive (in a seemingly "objective" and disinterested package) rational and verifiable knowledge - a truth that is so obvious as to be irrefutable, when in fact it is highly subjective and hierarchical.
In the second chapter, Duncan traces the development of the museum from the princely gallery into today's public, secular space, and maintains that this space is neither quite as clearly public, nor secular as it would like to be seen. Here, the Louvre and the National Gallery in London are primary examples. The museum here serves particular needs of the bourgeois state and its ideology.
The third chapter follows the "museum boom" in the United States that begun in the late 19th century. Duncan sees it as a pretentious attempt of the new republic with no history to boast to be seen as civilized and a part of wider Western culture. She follows the mushrooming of "American Louvres", museums that ideologically support White Protestants' view of themselves and their political power. Here, an American museum equals money.
Private museums that once belonged to rich collectors are dealt with in the fourth chapter. The characters of the often ruthless and predominantly white men are vividly brought to life, together with how they saw themselves, and how they wished their collections to reflect this.
The final chapter deals in great length with the nature of modern art, and its use in today's museums.
The premise that museums are ritual sites is highly problematic and on closer examination cannot be supported by facts. The argument that older museums were built in the style that closely followed that of the temples of antiquity is a hollow one, for in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, all structures of significance were built that way. Banks, schools, parliaments, city markets, private houses, ch?teaux, family crypts, public baths and indeed museums were built in that style. Does it mean that all of these were ritualistic, temple-like places? Hardly. Duncan either doesn't know it or doesn't grasp the significance. Instead she tells us that in art museums, it is the visitors who perform the ritual. And I think therein lies the problem. While it is perfectly reasonable to say that a great majority (if not all) of people attending a mass in a church are there for a specific - ritualistic - reason, such assumption won't work when studying the behavior of museum-goers who may be there for a number of causes. First of all, there is absolutely nothing about timing one's visit to a museum that would suggest this. There is nothing regular about the visits and such a visit is often accidental as much as planned. Once inside the museum, I have never seen anything that would suggest any shared patterns of the visitors' conduct that would support this `ritual' theory. I have always interpreted what is more-or-less silence or only quiet talk as a mere politeness towards people around, rather then any sort of `ritualistic behavior'. I am silent in a hospital too. Whether one wants to admire one particular work of art or even see it as such is one's free choice. No museum in the world could force me to look at something longer then I want to. I have seen people, particularly in American museums, to behave no differently the they would elsewhere. Museums can place all manner of things for us to see in every way they can, to represent whatever they want them to represent, but in the end it is up to us to accept it or not. If someone wants to worship, why should I care?
Duncan quotes Goethe as he impatiently waited for the opening of the Dresden Gallery in 1768 and using his exaltations as a proof of the ritualistic nature of gallery visits. She probably doesn't realize, that if this was the very first day of a gallery functioning, in the 18th century when there were almost no public museums or galleries, there could be hardly any talk of an established ritual. Duncan states that the origins of the evolution of the museum from the princely gallery lie in the discourse "in which bourgeois and aristocratic modes of culture were pitted against each other" and that the museums such as the Louvre stand as monuments to the new bourgeois state as it emerged at the time of revolutions. Yet later in the second chapter she says that conversions of this type happened before revolution in Dresden and Vienna. Why aristocratic and ultra-conservative regimes such as Saxony and Austria had at the time, would promote a monument to bourgeois state remains a mystery our eager writer could not be bothered to explain. After all, even Bourbons were considering opening the Louvre to the public before the revolution. Between 1789 and 1871 France experienced several revolutions, was run by three monarchies, two empires, three republics, directory and a consulate, and went through the Paris Commune, yet none of these widely varied governments thought of closing down the museum. If the new type of museum was simply a monument to the bourgeoisie, then why was it kept on in Soviet Russia and the entire communist bloc? Little details like that could not bother Duncan. Her overall historical scholarship is below that of an eight-grader, and so she cheerfully states that by 1825 all western capitals, monarchical or republican had a national gallery. Obviously, the fact that in 1825, there was no republican government in Europe escapes her. It is the complete lack of in-depth knowledge on Duncan's part that allows her to arrogantly write that the countries of the third world have museums just so that they can receive western military and economic aid. It is not just that it is plainly insulting, but what is implied is that getting money and weapons from the west is as easy as building a museum. And why, then, do some third world countries that refuse aid from the west still build museums? If a major argument in (what I take for) a serious book is built on hot air like that, than the book is perhaps not as serious as we might think. Duncan, as is painfully obvious by now, has no taste. It is therefore no surprise that she hates those who do. With misplaced sarcasm she derides the practice of basing museums on `national genius', claiming this to be the governing pattern in the west by 19th century. I seriously doubt that, if only because hardly two, perhaps three countries in the west could possess such wealth of cultural heritage as to claim a genius and not be laughed at. British art galleries, for example, could hardly build their identity on such shaky ground. But Duncan does not care about facts. Or logic. She unworriedly states that museums were seen as instruments of "social change capable of strengthening the social order", without realizing that it is a contradiction in terms. Now the plot has been completely lost, and by chapter three Duncan doesn't talk about ritual anymore. What she wants is to hate and deride. To her, public museums set up in the United States in the second half of the 19th century are nothing but nests of hypocrisy, thinly veiled racist institutions, run by and for the white male, the root cause of all evil. Uncouth terms like the `WASP' are standard here and one is left wondering if all white male Protestants really are pathological liars. The impression one takes from this is that museum founders, donors and curators are twisted, dangerous psychopaths. Perhaps we should keep them under lock and key as soon as they even start rambling about museums. When talking about lives of museum donors, Duncan approaches something resembling mildly appealing writing, but only because the subject is interesting. Predictably, another pearl awaits us at the end of the fourth chapter where she idiotically writes that Andrew Mellon's refusal to have his name associated with the National Gallery "is an act, however, that also obscures the deep contradiction on which the National Gallery is built: that one man, single-handedly, was able to dictate, pay for, and carry out the creation of so potent a symbol of the nation's spiritual and material wealth". I don't see Duncan's point. So what if one man can do all this? One man was behind building of the Suez Canal, one man led India's independence movement, a single sixteen year old French girl in the 1420's saved her country, yet no one would claim there to be some "deep rooted" contradictions. One prefers to admire the courage and persistence of an individual. Duncan does not. To her, anyone out of the ordinary, above the average, is an elitist.
It all finally falls apart in the final chapter on modern art museums. These are places frequented by sexual deviants, all male. In fact, Duncan is convinced, all (!) of the modern art is about sex. This is just one of her bizarre beliefs, based on her strange, shamanistic psychoanalysis. I was, let me admit, a bit surprised to discover that as a man I had feelings of inadequacy and vulnerability in front of mature women (like Duncan, I presume) and was frightened of the vagina. Throwing in Latinisms just for good measure is apparently Duncan's idea of maturity.
Review.......2005-10-04
Excellent working with seller, received item very fast! Would definitely recommend business with this seller.
Informative and Easy to Read.......2000-06-04
Dr. Duncan's books discusses the history of art museums and focusses in on some notable, present day museums. Her approach combines the traditional art historian view with a sociological view. Art is not created in a vacuum and reflects the society it lives within. Duncan's approach gives us insight into why some artwork is accepted while other artwork is not.
This book was required reading in my undergraduate studies. It is one of the few I choose to have in my personal library as well.
Carol Duncan's book is small in size and easy to read. However, just because of its ease and size, don't mistake its value to art history. It is well researched and well edited. It is short, sweet and to the point. Too bad other art history books cannot be like that.
Informative, Easy To Read.......2000-06-04
Dr. Duncan's book was required reading in my undergraduate studies. She writes from two angles - first, being the traditional fine arts view, and second, a sociological view. Art is not created in a vacuum and is directly affected by the society it lives in. There is a value to looking at art from this combined point of view. You have a clear picture why some art is considered valuable, while some is not.
Carol Duncan's book delves into the reasons why we have art museums and then focusses in on some notable museums of today. The small book is an easy and quick read. However, its relative ease and small size does not mean it does not inform. It is well researched and well edited. It is short, sweet and to the point. Too bad more art history books are not like that.
Book Description
This book introduces students to new ways of thinking about culture and development. The book integrates the recent scholarship in the area of cultural studies within the existing frameworks of development studies, which have primarily focused on issues of political economy and structural transformation. Rather than viewing culture as simply an attribute of the societies undergoing development, this text critically examines how development itself operates as a cultural process. The authors draw on theories of modernity, poststructuralism and post-colonial studies to show how development institutions, processes and practices are inevitably caught up in a web of cultural presuppositions, values and meanings.The authors use the themes of gender, tradition and identity, human rights and new communication technologies to explore the challenges that processes of cultural change pose to conventional understandings of development. The book concludes by considering the move beyond development to a post-development paradigm.The book is made up of thematic chapters which include outlines and overviews of the specific topics, as well as case studies to illustrate the issues. The authors have designed the book specifically for students and teachers and the material included has been class-tested during their own teaching.
Book Description
While over the past decade a number of scholars have done significant work on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities, this volume is the first to collect this groundbreaking work and make black queer studies visible as a developing field of study in the United States. Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Including work by scholars based in English, film studies, black studies, sociology, history, political science, legal studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, the volume showcases the broadly interdisciplinary nature of the black queer studies project.
The contributors consider representations of the black queer body, black queer literature, the pedagogical implications of black queer studies, and the ways that gender and sexuality have been glossed over in black studies and race and class marginalized in queer studies. Whether exploring the closet as a racially loaded metaphor, arguing for the inclusion of diaspora studies in black queer studies, considering how the black lesbian voice that was so expressive in the 1970s and 1980s is all but inaudible today, or investigating how the social sciences have solidified racial and sexual exclusionary practices, these insightful essays signal an important and necessary expansion of queer studies.
Contributors. Bryant K. Alexander, Devon Carbado, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Keith Clark, Cathy Cohen, Roderick A. Ferguson, Jewelle Gomez, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae G. Henderson, Sharon P. Holland, E. Patrick Johnson, Kara Keeling, Dwight A. McBride, Charles I. Nero, Marlon B. Ross, Rinaldo Walcott, Maurice O. Wallace
Customer Reviews:
Don't know what the other reviewer is thinking.......2006-12-29
this book was really good! Well rounded text. Great format (although small print). Nearly 350 pages. I would highly recommend to Women's Studies, Black Studies, Queer Theory, English majors (studying African American lit).
Hardcore Jargon on Intersectional Group.......2006-06-17
For decades, African-American studies scholars have left issues facing non-heterosexuals to the side. For years, "queer" scholars have left concerns of people of color to the side. This anthology tries to address that void. It goes a long way in proving that black, gay academics can be just a rigorous and hardcore as white gay ones or straight black ones. The anthology has representative numbers of men and women. In some ways, it's a Who's Who of Black Gay Academia, including works from Cathy Cohen, Dwight McBride, and Jewelle Gomez.
Still, there is much about this book that frustrated me. A few years ago, a study was done of black LGBTs and most respondents said they hated the term "queer," yet the academics here champion it. Really, if "queer" is supposed to represent the four groups equally, then this book was quite lacking in its coverage of bisexuals and the transgendered. This is surprising given famous black bisexual writers such as Alice Walker, Stuart Hall, and June Jordan. Often "people of color" is used when only blacks are brought up; Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans barely come up in this book at all.
James Baldwin is brought up often here. I understand that. His writings were rigorous and often dealt with racial and sexual issues simultaneously. Still, I kept thinking about how bell hooks once wrote that Toni Morrison gets a lot of attention when publishers won't print the works of black women that are equally as sophisticated. James Baldwin deserves his crown in black, gay letters, but I'm concerned about him being the only one to get to wear a crown. Several books have been printed about the many non-hetero members of the Harlem Renaissance, yet that group hardly comes up here. James is getting a bit played out and the authors here are not helping change that tendency.
Finally, I had beef with many of the essays. Charles Nero has great points but his essay is really two works glued together. Can anyone really say the whiteness of New Orleans' "gay ghetto" is due to "Chasing Amy" or "Six Feet Under"? One author could have written quickly about how he supported a gay, feminine student when that student was condemned by a masculine, heterosexual one. Instead, he went on and on in unnecessary jargon and babble. Kara Keeling's essay was 90% theory and 10% a discussion of Dunye's "Watermelon Woman." Why bother to bring up the film if you're barely going to discuss it?
I wasn't really feelin' this text, but that's not to say it didn't have great aims.
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Bataille: A Critical Reader (Critical Readers)
Scott Wilson
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Story of the Eye
ASIN: 0631199578 |
Book Description
An elegant introduction to Bataille's major concepts and concerns, Bataille: A Critical Reader underlines the powerful impact his work has had, in different ways, on an entire generation of thinkers. It reveals a fascinating genealogy, marking Bataille's pivotal position for theorists whose own work has enabled the transformation of literary and cultural studies in the Anglo-American academy in the last twenty years. The Critical Reader thus redresses what has been a gaping oversight in the reception of French thought since the 1960s. Keying their selections to The Bataille Reader, the editors provide students and general readers of both volumes with an essential and consistently clear source of reference and elucidation. Chapters included are by: Jean Baudrillard, Maurice Blanchot, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Joseph Goux, Denis Hollier, Jurgen Habermas, Philippe Sollers, with an extensive introduction by the editors.
Book Description
This is an authoritative and accessible guide to modern ideas in the broad interdisciplinary fields of cultural and critical theory that have developed from interactions among different modern traditions of thought. All strands of theory are represented in a volume that reflects the remarkable dissolution during the past 20 years of many of the traditional boundaries separating disciplines of study. Work in these fields that appeared before the twentieth century is included when it forms an important context for understanding later thinking. A special feature of the dictionary is the inclusion of a number of speculative or polemical essays on selected key topics or authors. Entries include movements such as deconstruction, the work of individual theorists such as Louis Althusser, Karl Marx, Raymond Williams, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva and Virginia Woolf, and also important concepts. This dictionary will be invaluable to students and scholars in such disciplines as literature, film studies, cultural studies, philosophy, history, theology, linguistics, politics, law, urban studies, psychoanalysis, and women's studies. It is supported by an analytic index and a comprehensive bibliography.
Customer Reviews:
The DEFINITIVE guide to all things theoretical!!.......1998-02-18
I strongly reccomend this book to anyone working in the fields of cultural and communications theory. The explanations are straightforward and accurate. The cross-referencing is exhaustive and well laid out. The first dictionary I ever read cover to cover!!!
Book Description
Rather than a straightforward dictionary of terms, this book gives students a brief introduction to each concept together with short extracts from the work of key thinkers and critics. Each term, concept or keyword and the passages discussing these are glossed and annotated; at the end of each entry a few reflective, practical questions direct the student to consider a particular aspect of the quotations and the concept they address. The book is designed to be used as a dip-in reference book as well as a guide to literary theory for practical classroom use.
Book Description
This is a systematically revised and updated new edition of a highly-acclaimed text which was an immediate bestseller on courses around the world. The second edition takes a broader perspective giving increased coverage of other dimensions of globalization alongside its core focus on the rise of supraterritoriality which the author argues is globalization's most distinctive feature.
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Transforming Mind: A Critical Cognitive Activity (Language and Ideology)
Gloria Gannaway
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ASIN: 0897892798 |
Book Description
Emergent paradigms in the physical sciences are combined with deconstructionist methods and Vygotsky's theory of speech and thought to formulate new mind-sets for society and education, which will promote nonlinear, nonpatriarchal, nonviolent, anti-authoritarian worldviews on which to build stronger individuals and societies. E. D. Hirsch and other establishment education "reformers" are shown to be dangerously noncritical and bound to old paradigms that advocate simple solutions to complex problems. Gannaway contends that the nature of contemporary American society is unique and must be creatively analyzed before the educational system can be effectively reformed. She shows teachers how to use familiar texts from popular culture to develop habits of critical thinking that will protect students and citizens from insidious mass media myths.
Book Description
In Critical Moves Randy Martin sets in motion an inquiry into the relationship between dance, politics, and cultural theory. Drawing on his own experiences as a dancer as well as his observations as a cultural critic and social theorist, Martin illustrates how the study and practice of dance can reanimate arrested prospects for progressive politics and social change.
From experimental and concert dance to more popular expressions, Martin engages a range of performances and demonstrates how a critical reflection on dance helps promote fluency in the language of mobilization that political theory alludes to yet rarely speaks. He explores how Bill T. Jones’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land defies attempts to separate social ideas from aesthetic concerns and celebrates multiculturalism in the face of a singular national culture; he studies the choreography in rapper Ice Cube’s video “Wicked,” which confronts racialized depictions of violent crime; and he discusses how racial difference is negotiated by analyzing a hip hop aerobics class in a nonblack environment.
Revealing how mastery of modern dance technique teaches an individual body to express cultural difference and display its intrinsic diversity, Critical Moves concludes with a reflection on the contribution dance studies can make to other fields within cultural studies and social sciences. As such it becomes an occasion to rethink the terms of history and agency, multiculturalism and nationalism, identity and political economy. This book will appeal not only to scholars and practitioners of dance, but also to a wide cross-section of people concerned with the study of political theory and the history of social movements.
Book Description
Its opponents call it part of "the lunatic fringe," a justification for "black separateness," "the most embarrassing trend in American publishing." "It" is Critical Race Theory.
But what is Critical Race Theory? How did it develop? Where does it stand now? Where should it go in the future? In this volume, thirty-one CRT scholars present their views on the ideas and methods of CRT, its role in academia and in the culture at large, and its past, present, and future.
Critical race theorists assert that both the procedures and the substance of American law are structured to maintain white privilege. The neutrality and objectivity of the law are not just unattainable ideals; they are harmful actions that obscure the law's role in protecting white supremacy. This notion—so obvious to some, so unthinkable to others—has stimulated and divided legal thinking in this country and, increasingly, abroad.
The essays in Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory—all original—address this notion in a variety of helpful and exciting ways. They use analysis, personal experience, historical narrative, and many other techniques to explain the importance of looking critically at how race permeates our national consciousness.
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Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States
Whose Muse?: Art Museums and the Public Trust
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