1st Edition

Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture

By Eilean Hooper-Greenhill Copyright 2000
    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    210 Pages
    by Routledge

    This is a multi-disciplinary study that adopts an innovative and original approach to a highly topical question, that of meaning-making in museums, focusing its attention on pedagogy and visual culture.

    This work explores such questions as:

    • How and why is it that museums select and arrange artefacts, shape knowledge, construct a view?
    • How do museums produce values?
    • How do active audiences make meaning from what they experience in museums?

    This stimulating book provokes debate and discussion on these topics and puts forward the idea of a new museum - the post-museum, which will challenge the familiar modernist museum.  A must for students and professionals in the field.

    1 Culture and meaning in the museum 2 Picturing the ancestors and imagining the nation: the collections of the first decade of the National Portrait Gallery London 3 Speaking for herself? Hinemihi and her discourses, 4 Words and things: constructing narratives, constructing the self, 5 Objects and interpretive processes, 6 Exhinitions and interpretation: museum pedagogy and cultural change, 7 The rebirth of the museum.

    Biography

    Eilean Hooper-Greenhill has taught in schools, colleges, museums and galleries. She has been lecturing in the Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester since 1980 and took over as Head of Department in 1996. Her principle publications are Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (Routledge, 1992), Museums and their Visitors (Routledge, 1994) and her edited collections are Museum, Media, Message (Routledge, 1995) and The Educational Role of Museums, 2nd Edition (Routledge, 1999).