The Final Body Of Literature

Never before have I seen a museum as grand as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. From its architecture to its massive art collection, The Met has a little bit of everything and one is sure to find something that captures his or her interest. Considering that The Met is the United States' largest art museum, it is easy to get lost within its many corridors and wings. My visit to The Met took place during the last week of July. Despite the almost unbearable heat and humidity that hung in the air, visiting museums under these climate conditions is a welcome respite from a suffocating, yet bright summer afternoon.

Museums have long served a purpose as cultural staples. For every museum, big and small, careful consideration is used in selecting its contents. When securing new items for a museum, it is most important to consider public appeal, educational value, and cost-effectiveness.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum publically showcases Mrs. Gardner's collection in the greater Boston area. Each room functions as a chapter of a pilgrimage. When one travels through various countries and time periods, one inevitably ends up in a gallery built in the imitation of a chapel, and subsequently the Gothic room. In this paper, I will examine the Gothic room's theme in relation to the placement of its objects. I will also evaluate the room's strengths and challenges in serving the public, and how the conventions employed in this room contribute to the general accessibility of the museum.

Positioned alongside Central Park in the heart of New York City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest and most influential art museums in the world. The Met houses an extensive collection of curated works that spans throughout various time periods and different cultures. The context of museum, especially one as influential as the Met, inherently predisposes its visitors to a certain set of understandings that subtly influence how they interpret and ultimately construct meanings about each individual object within the museum. Brent Plate in Religion, Art, and Visual Culture argues that “objects obtain different meanings in different locations and historical settings.”An object placed on display behind a glass case inside a museum would hold a vastly different meaning if it was put on sale by a street vendor, like the ones who set up their tables in close proximity to the Met. The different meanings that objects are able to obtain is attributed to the relationships that are established between the object itself and the environment that surrounds it. These relationships often involve the kind of audience that a museum attracts, where the work is exhibited, and how the exhibits within a museum is planned out. Museums subsequently have the ability to control how these relationships are established which influences the way a viewer is able to construct meaning. When a visitor observes an object on display at the Met, they instinctively construct a certain set of

The museum that I chose is the Philbrook Museum, and on the second floor of this museum is the gallery that I have chosen. It is a 20th century Native American Art gallery called “Identity and Inspiration”. The collection not only holds a very diverse assortment of contemporary Native art, but it also holds a well-documented selection of the artist’s motivations that influenced their creative process. I liked how the exhibit held a very wide range of space in-between each of the object cases. The white walls and clear cases made the gallery seem not as crowded, and the way the objects were spaced out seemed incredibly orderly. In some other museum galleries, the objects seem to be organized culturally or geographically; but in this gallery,

The museum’s Collections of the art turn out to rely on the contributions of passionate individual collectors. Both the museums were founded for the purpose of encouraging and developing the study of fine arts and are open for the public, and situated in the United States.(Walter 3)

Subsequently, Americans borrowed this European form of the gallery but gave them a distinct American meaning. Conveying concerns about a deteriorating society the The New York Times wrote in 1889, “The great foreign population, largely uneducated, has so upset municipal politics that it is hard for an American of education to be firmly friendly to the civic majority” (Duncan, 1995, p. 56). This statement reveals the notion that the poor and the foreign required civilizing and thus formed the basis for the next phase of museum development. Accordingly, as the number of museums and public access to them increased throughout the 20th century, curators used an orderly display of objects to create a worldly interest and a respect for authority from

I enjoyed reading your excellent post, and I am absolutely agree with you. Art historian’s goal is to study and save an artwork for us and the future through documentation, interpretation, and analysis. I agree that “Objects take on a vitality in museums through their discursive deployment in relation to each other and their environment”, and there is no any theoretic or virtual substitution for a real painting, sculpture, etc. Although curator’s goal is to make the artwork interesting for a visitor, visitor’s interest might be an enigmatic thing. Very often, we walk through museum and look without seeing since we are not ready to see. Our preparedness might be based on multiple factors: on our special education and reading of the historic

In this essay I will be comparing and contrasting some of the museums’ similarities and differences, as well as discussing some of the museums’ attributes that make me want to visit them the most. I will be comparing

Once the visitors have ventured through one exhibit they are then directed to next culturally diverse exhibit. Like most ritual space, museum space is carefully marked off culturally designed as reserved for a special quality of attention in this case of contemplating and learning (Duncan, p. 425). Visitors can enter the Western American Art, which takes the visitors on a different cultural journey of enlightenment. One would see, the magnificence behind the objects and paintings in the exhibit to realize that the works are art are here for their sheer thought provoking beauty. If art objects are most properly used when contemplated as art, then the museum is the most proper setting for them, since it makes them useless for any other purpose

Subsequent to the establishment of the modern museum, collections ceased to be used as markers of wealth and status. Rather, collections gained value as educational tools at the disposal of the public. Accompanying this newfound emphasis on the educational role of collections, came innovative ideas on how to arrange the objects in museum collections, in order to assist in the diffusion of knowledge. Essentially, museums drew on earlier notions of specialization, to further imposed categorical boundaries on collections. These boundaries, which determine the scope of a museum’s collection, are specific to the individual mission of a museum. Furthermore, the introduction of systems such as classifications, taxonomies and typologies in the 19th century saw the objects in museum collections organised based on shared external characteristics, rather than notions of internal symbolism. In modern museums, objects are generally classified by their physical attributes (size, shape, colour, material, etc.), provenance, chronology, function and context. The sorting of objects into such categories has become known as ‘Systematic Collecting’. Today, systematic collecting is the standard by which all other collecting activities are typically judged. Thus, by introducing a systematic approach to collecting, the modern museum has played a pivotal role in legitimising and institutionalising the joint concepts of collecting and

Pieces of literature can have a really big impact in your life. For example, reading “The Rainbow Fish” by Marcus Pfister, can teach children that sharing will make you feel good inside. People of all aged can be impacted in ways they never thought possible while reading literature. It can either impact a person in a big way or a small way. There are two pieces of literature that impacted my life in a big way: “There’s No Place like Space” by Dr. Seuss and “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking.

The ideas of anthropologist Nelson Graburn (1977) were embraced by the Commission on Museums for a New Cent,. He identifies three human needs that a museum can fill, one of which he terms as "associations]." The museum is a place where we can associate with each other, have a social experience and that shared experience becomes the visitor experience. Graburn is not alone with this idea. Sheldon Mnis (1986), a geographer who refers to the visitor experience as "symbolic engagements," describes a pragmatic space. The visitor and his/her companions become the primary symbol and the museum has little influence on the meanings that are created. "Being there in some particular social union is both purpose and product" (Annis, 1986, p. 170). Paulette

When it comes to the exhibition in museums, there is increasing discussion of museum as dialogue environment and its learning impacts on audience. Modern museums have gradually transferred their emphasis from collection, conservation and research to display and education. Besides the traditional functions of museum, 吉村典夫( 1979: 104-107) maintains that organisation is encouraged to develop responsibilities-

The development of a new architectural form, museums, had greatly changed the traditional classical architectures into innovative modern architectures. Jayne Merkel, a historian and critic, identifies three elements that control and define this development in museums as “lighting, security, and procession through space.” Unlike those traditional rectilinear space that isolated from the outside world where even light were mostly artificial, museums are now increasingly open to natural light and paying more attention on introducing strong spacial experience of the visitors.