Museum Mediations

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In these 19 insightful and frequently witty meditations, Stephen E. Weil examines the purposes and functions of the museum in the late 20th century, proposing museums make encounters with a variety of visitors more central to their operation.

Mediation is a very old practice that has been reborn to meet the needs of the contemporary world. It is thus increasingly present in today's societies. This book presents the theoretical foundations of mediation, as well as the way in which teachers and researchers in Information and Communication Sciences (ICS) have taken up this concept. Whether it is communicational, informational, cultural, organizational or societal, mediation belongs to a field of research, instituted by ICS, which sees in it a process of overcoming conflict, restoring communication and deconstructing social connections. Mediation: A Concept for Information and Communication Sciences inaugurates this set through its contribution to a state of the art of the theory and concepts used by the ICS community. It is addressed to teachers, researchers and students, as well as information professionals wishing to think about their daily practice.

This book presents an innovative application of strategic and experiential marketing in the museum sector, which uses a new cultural mediation model to enrich the visitor experience via increased audience engagement. Leveraging a case study of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Arts in Rome, the book helps readers understand how to apply marketing management to cultural mediation, enabling museums to segment the visitors’ market to drive improvements to arts accessibility and engagement. By running a comprehensive and multi-method research project, the authors propose a customized cultural mediation model to support museums in facing the current challenges and build their future. Our model supports museums in segmenting the visitors’ market and designing cultural mediation for enriched visitor experiences; readers will also learn how to invest, manage, hire, and train staff members devoted to this service, resulting in more engaging and successful experiences. This book will be a valuable resource for educational services offices at museums worldwide. This book will also be of interest to researchers, academics, and scholars carrying out research in the fields of museum management, cultural mediation and communication, and marketing.

Brands, which are major economic entities and major symbols of market mediations, are increasingly appearing in the social arena as cultural actors in their own right. Their quest for social legitimacy and to have control over the markets goes beyond the usual framework of their communication with initiatives that have begun to have an impact on the French cultural landscape. Media, digital content, educational kits, museum exhibitions and so on are the actions of an unadvertization, which has the potential to transform not only the rapport brands have with the public but also representations of knowledge and culture. The communicative approach at the heart of this book illuminates the contemporary transformations of communication, highlighting three main types of cultural mediations: media, education, and cultural heritage institutions. Cultural Mediations of Brands thus provides a theoretical and critical analysis of the brand and the symbolic effectiveness attributed to it.

This interdisciplinary study participates in the ongoing critical conversation about postwar American poetry and visual culture, while advancing that field into the arena of the museum. Turning to contemporary poems about the visual arts that foreground and interrogate a museum setting, the book demonstrates the particular importance of the museum as a cultural site that is both inspiration and provocation for poets. The study uniquely bridges the dual canon in contemporary poetry (and calls the lyric/avant-garde distinction into question) by analyzing museum-sponsored anthologies as well as poems by John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Kenneth Koch, Kathleen Fraser, Cole Swensen, Anne Carson, and others. Through these case studies of poets with diverse affiliations, the author shows that the boom in ekphrasis in the past 20 years is not only an aesthetic but a critical phenomenon, a way that poets have come to terms with the critical dilemmas of our moment. Highlighting the importance of poets' peripheral vision-awareness of the institutional conditions that frame encounters with art-the author contend that a museum visit becomes a forum for questioning oppositions that have preoccupied literary criticism for the past 50 years: homage and innovation, modernism and postmodernism, subjectivity and collectivity. The study shows that ekphrasis becomes a strategy for negotiating these impasses-a mode of political inquiry, a meditation on canonization, a venue for comic appraisal of institutionalization, and a means of site-specific feminist revision-in a vital synthesis of critique, perspicacity, and pleasure.

The current “digital revolution” or “digital era” has affected most of the realms of today’s world, particularly the domains of communication and the creation, safeguarding and transmission of knowledge. Museums, whose mission is to be open to the public and to acquire, conserve, research, communicate and exhibit the heritage of humanity, are thus directly concerned by this revolution. This collection highlights the manner in which museums and curators tackle the challenges of digital technology. The contributions are divided into four groups that illustrate the extent of the impact of digital technologies on museums: namely, exhibitions devoted to new media or mounted with the use of new media; the hidden face of the museum and the conservation of digital works of art; cultural mediation and the communication and promotion of museums using digital tools; and the legal aspects of the digitalisation of content, whether for creative purposes or preservation.

MUSEUM MEDIA Edited by Michelle Henning Museum Media explores the contemporary uses of diverse media in museum contexts and discusses how technology is reinventing the museum. It considers how technological changes—from photography and television through to digital mobile media—have given rise to new habits, forms of attention and behaviors. It explores how research methods can be used to understand people's relationships with media technologies and display techniques in museum contexts, as well as the new opportunities media offer for museums to engage with their visitors. Entries written by leading experts examine the transformation of history and memory by new media, the ways in which exhibitions mediate visitor experience, how designers and curators can establish new kinds of relationships with visitors, the expansion of the museum beyond its walls and its insertion into a wider commercial and corporate landscape. Focusing on formal, theoretical and technical aspects of exhibition practice, this in-depth volume explores questions of temporality, attachment to objects, atmospheric and immersive exhibition design, the reinvention of the exhibition medium, and much more.