Destination Culture

aw_product_id: 
37914268211
merchant_image_url: 
merchant_category: 
Books
search_price: 
33.00
book_author_name: 
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
book_type: 
Paperback
publisher: 
University of California Press
published_date: 
05/09/1998
isbn: 
9780520209664
Merchant Product Cat path: 
Books > Art, Fashion & Photography > Art & design > Art: general issues
specifications: 
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett|Paperback|University of California Press|05/09/1998
Merchant Product Id: 
9780520209664
Book Description: 
"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.

Graphic Design by Ishmael Annobil /  Web Development by Ruzanna Hovasapyan