The Museum And Popular Culture

Museums and Popular Culture seeks to unravel the paradox that to adequately reflect popular culture museums may need to abandon their traditional form. This is a book which no one interested in museums can afford to ignore.

What are museums for? How far should museums shift from their traditional focus on high culture to explore popular culture? How can the passion people feel for popular material culture best be conveyed in displays? In attempting to answer these fundamental questions, Kevin Moore offers a radical critique of existing museum practice, arguing that, in order to have a sustainable future, museums must rise to the challenge of representing popular culture. Drawing on examples (both successful and unsuccessful) of contemporary museum practice, including the V&A's blockbuster shows on David Bowie and Alexander McQueen, and the Saatchi Gallery's Rolling Stones exhibiti, he seeks to unravel the paradox that to reflect popular culture adequately, museums may need to abandon their traditional form.

Although libraries and museums for many centuries have taken the lead, under one rational or another, in recovering, storing, and displaying various kinds of culture of their periods, lately, as the gap between elite and popular culture has apparently widened, these repositories of artifacts of the present for the future have tended to drift more and more to what many people call the aesthetically pleasing elements of our culture. The degree to which our libraries and museums have ignored our culture is terrifying, when one scans the documents and artifacts of our time which, if history in any wise repeats itself, will in the immediate and distant future become valuable indices of our present culture to future generations. As Professor Schroeder dramatically states it, "No doubt about it, it is the contemporary popular culture that is the endangered species." The essays in this book investigate the reasons for present-day neglect of popular culture materials and chart the various routes by which conscientious and insightful librarians and museum directors can correct this disastrous oversight.

Readins in high & low

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