Some Remarks on the Development Potential of Ethnographic Museums in Poland

Privatisation of the Production of Public Space

Canadian Cultural Policy-making at a Time of Neoliberal Globalization Sabine Milz (bio) The imperative for research is to identify precisely what remains national today in what has historically been constructed as national, to decode what national means today, and to ascertain the new territorial and institutional conditionalities of nation states. Saskia Sassen In the introduction to the special issue "Canadian Literature and the Business of Publishing" of Studies in Canadian Literature (SCL), Jennifer Andrews and John Ball observe that "in most studies of Canadian literature, the material stuff of publication is bracketed off in favour of what can be said about a text's (immaterial) words" (2). They further note that "[w]hen the study of the published book and the publication processes has been discussed, it has been treated as a specialized area of research" (2), as in the case of the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University or in special issues such as the SCL one which sets out to foreground the processes of literary production in Canada, that is, the material side of literature. Andrews and Ball introduce the special SCL issue by calling attention to the many challenges Canada's book industry has faced over the past decades as an economy of small scale characterized by "huge geographical distances and regional differences ... [and] the easy availability of British and American books published with economies [End Page 85] of scale" (1–2). They point to the crucial role governmental policies and programs as well as the literary power struggles of the youth generation of the 1960s and 1970s—of "the many stubborn idealists, renegades, adventurers, bookworms, scholars, and, yes, fortune-seekers" (2)—played in the development of an independent Canadian literature and book industry. These actors not only initiated and advocated the Canada-wide emergence of independent Canadian-owned presses in the 1960s but also created a climate in which these publisers could take risks with promoting unknown authors and authors writing about unconventioanl themes. Recalling the nationalist vision of Canadian Literature's centennial "Publishing in Canada" issue, Andrews and Ball insist that "publishing in Canada is unique and vital to our national identity" (3); it performs a key national function, and that seems to be what motivates Andres and Ball's call for a method of Canadian literary study that recognizes the materiality of literature. While the argument developed in this paper is motivated by a claim or desire that also underlies Andrews and Ball's emphasis on the "national" —namely the claim or desire that the function of Canadian literary goods and services is irreducible to the logic of the market, that is, to the logic of "guaranteed commercial success" (4)—it reframes this claim or desire —expressed by Andrews and Ball as an issue of national culture and identity—as an issue of cultural decision-making and democratic public culture. Critical invocations of national cultural value such as Andrews and Ball's are complicated and troubled by the fact that, as this paper will show, contemporary cultural policies and programs are inaugurated by a federal government which subscribes to the neoliberal paradigm in its discourse of "national culture" and its protection of Canadian literature and its production from direct market dependency and commodification. In view of this nexus of the national and the neoliberal, I will argue, the contemporary study of the materiality of Canadian literature, and of its mediated-institutionalized structural modes in particular, needs to engage in processes of querying the habitual, modern notions of democracy and the public sphere and, more specifically, of how these notions currently play out in the contexts of Canada's public cultural sphere. This paper engages in such a process of querying to decode what the terms "national" and "public" mean today in the institutional contexts of Canadian literature and its production. I will start this process of querying and decoding by examining the issue of cultural protection/ism in the historical context of the post Second World War projects of cultural nationalism and cultural industries. Canadian critics such as George Parker and Rowland Lorimer have variously [End Page 86] demonstrated that "the history of Canadian book publishing policy dates back...

European museums are increasingly responding to the continent’s growing multicultural and multireligious population. Among the key challenges is the representation of Muslims, not only in public discourse but also in heritage institutions. This article examines how Islamic art is conventionally displayed in major European art museums through ethnographic fieldwork conducted primarily in the Netherlands between 2018 and 2024. Drawing on participant observation, exhibition analysis, and interviews with museum professionals and community members, this exploratory study argues that exhibitions often emphasise a glorified Islamic past while framing the tradition as static or incapable of progression. Even curatorial efforts aimed at ‘democratisation’ can inadvertently reinforce negative stereotypes and binary distinctions between a refined and an unrefined Islam. While this study’s findings are based on specific contexts and cannot be generalised to all Muslim experiences in Europe, they illuminate broader dynamics of representation, inclusion, and the reproduction of ‘otherness’ in contemporary museum practices.

Public memories and private tastes: The shifting definitions of museums and their visitors in the UK

Museums face to face with the millenium: The view of a sociologist

There is no doubt that museums now operate in a distinctly different market to those of the past. Rottenberg [Rottenberg, B. (2002). Museums, information and the public sphere. Museum International, 54(4), 21–28] identifies the two major trends in museums in the latter years of the 20th century as being ‘the prevalence of a new market-orientated ideology that stressed the importance of revenue generation’ and ‘the introduction of new technologies that transfixed not only the museum profession, but also the world’. The main impact, which these and other changes have had is the revision of the museum into a setting for recreational experiences [Foley, M. and McPherson, G. (2000). Museums as leisure. International Journal of Heritage Studies 16(2), 161–174; Stephen, A. (2001). The contemporary museum and leisure: Recreation as a museum function. Museum Management and Curatorship 19(3), 297–308], rather than an educative one. This paper attempts to address some of these shifts in ideology and purpose. The main concern that museums face as they become more ‘recreation-focused’ is that they will lose what has long been believed to be their ‘integrity’, and thus stray from their original missions to preserve and educate, with critics suggesting that they may simply become arenas for pleasure rather than education. This paper concludes that in future, it seems inevitable that museums will become ‘hybrid places, combining recreation and learning, allowing visitors diversions from the intense stimuli of strolling through galleries and viewing multitudinous objects’ [Kotler, N. (2004). New ways of experiencing culture: the role of museums and marketing implications. Museum Management and Curatorship, 19(4), 417–425], with entertainment and education working together to fulfil the museum's mission. Museums need not be afraid of using entertainment, but should embrace it as a tool for learning, potentially attracting a wider and more diversified public.

<i>Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display</i>. By Peggy Levitt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. x+244. $29.95.

A small group of people are heaping criticism on the leaders of the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as they pursue construction of a new building. I’ve received a great many emails from these critics’ publicist asking our journal to “cover the issue,” without understanding that this is a scholarly peer-reviewed journal that encourages debate over museum management and practice. They shared eleven opinion pieces written by one journalist1 1 The following are the claims made by a journalist about the illegitimacy of the new LACMA Campus: Giovanni, J. October 2020 https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/10/02/the-demolition-of-lacma-art-sacrificed-to-architecture/ July 2020 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lacma-town-museum-urban-catalyst/ May 2020 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lacma-demolition-under-cover-of-covid-19/ February 2020 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lacma-part-going-rogue/ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lacma-part-ii-spamming-public/ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lacma-part-iii-way-forward/ April 2019 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lacma-suicide-by-architecture/ August 2016 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dead-late-august-zumthors-lacma-folly-continues/ July 2015 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/inconvenient-truths-at-lacma/ April 2015 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/peter-zumthor-lacma-preacher-wrong-church/ July 2014 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/frank-gehry-design-lacma/ that expressed a singular dislike for the new museum concept and the museum’s leadership. But none stood up to scrutiny on their merit. The Citizens Brigade to Save LACMA declined to submit their thesis as a Forum for this issue, but after some thought on the press about the demolition, I thought I would use the subject of this special issue to consider what this case study suggests about the legitimacy crises that can threaten continuity in a museum’s leadership. I have not interviewed any of the leaders of LACMA and write this editorial from the perspective of a dispassionate observer reading the public declarations on both sides of the debate. The central issue seems to be the debate around public communications by leadership, transparency in the accessioning and deaccessioning policy, and the legitimacy of the organization’s board of directors as a stewards of art on behalf of a diverse citizenry. The razing of the old LACMA campus offers museum leaders a chance to think about what constitutes public integrity and the relationship of architecture to a museum’s mission. For historical reference, LACMA grew, for nearly a century, into a hodge-podge collection of buildings by well-known architects. Like many of the world’s major museums, additions on additions represented each era of museum priorities and styles. By 2013, the museum management decided that it was time to just erase the accretion, cleanse the property, and build a new building designed by yet another internationally respected museum architect. For full disclosure, I’m a museum researcher, a psychologist and an architect. I have visited the former LACMA chaos and tend to agree with leadership that the campus was a bit of a mess. But that mess was not out of place in tinsel town. I can understand the museum leadership’s desire to jettison the architectural history in one grand sweep, but the complexities of public politics is where the lessons seem to nest. Art museums tend to attract affluent and socially well-positioned donors to their board. Their visitors are more likely to represent an educated affluent community, which inevitably leads to a challenge of how public resources are allocated (see: Ostrower, 2020). For example, public resources are used to sustain “the arts” are seldom equitably distributed. Under normal circumstances, the underclasses and lower castes accept that government resources will be diverted to the affluent and acknowledge the theater that purports egalitarian access to art, but also have experiences that confirm their own exclusion (Dawson, 2014; Isselhart & Cross, 2020; Maldonado & Nguyen, 2020). In LACMA’s case, the existing buildings were lauded as exemplary architecture of their time. They were purported to represent the art of architecture. While other museum types may build functional tools for their purpose, art museums justify the high premiums for name architects to represent the art of architecture. The destruction of the former campus (Figure 1) makes clear that the rationale supporting architecture as an art has failed. Here we turn to the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) in the USA, an in-group collective of leaders that recently relaxed their standards for deaccessioning to support funding museum maintenance through sale of collections. The American Alliance of Museums deaccessioning guidelines also suggest that secure stewardship of any collection be part of the decision regarding transfer or sale. Again, for full disclosure, the organization where I work did the membership surveys that led to the AAM deaccessioning guidelines (American Alliance of Museums, 2016). Few museum professionals would find purchase of an artwork with the intent to destroy, acceptable, even if the funds could sustain the current facility. Would any art museum leader retain legitimacy if their donors know that ancient masters could land on a pyre in exchange for a bit of currency? Lastly, leadership has suggested that failure of functionality and mission led to their decision to destroy the campus. This rationale has three parts: (1) the buildings themselves were not suited to current exhibition ambitions; (2) the campus collections were failing to equitably serve their community; and (3) the cost of retrofit was prohibitive. All three justifications can be rebutted by considering the Whitney Museum’s decision to simply move. The Whitney has ensured that a masterwork of the Brutalist school of architecture remains to serve its function and as a memory of the era. The LACMA campus is now a construction site (Figure 1). The former campus, like so many heritage structures demolished by modernist zeal, is remembered in photographs, technical drawings, and the memories of former visitors. LACMA leadership faced criticism that the new building will have less space than the former. This matter is a red herring for assessing the value of a museum. Buildings are assessed based on their efficiency, not the amount of area they occupy. That is a matter of engineering. Shrinking a museum may increase value for users if the focus is clear, and the exhibitions more useful. But we fail to see this justification presented by LACMA leadership. The result is disheartening because a more useful building for the museum’s mission is the central value of commissioning a construction. By speaking to purpose, efficiency of use, and a commitment to the future, the leadership can claim legitimacy with how it has struggled to reconcile it’s future with its past. But alas, that argument has not been offered. And the argument does not hold water since they did not consider transfer of their campus to others. The legitimation risk LACMA leadership now faces is the question of use of public assets and a violation of the public trust. Like so many sports stadiums that were constructed with public funds, only to line the pockets of the entrepreneurs who own the sports teams and their branded income, LACMA leadership and governing board have opened themselves to a question of whether their actions, as well-paid staff and affluent members of the Los Angeles area, are working in the public interest? When tax payers are asked to carry the financial burden for public buildings, they expect that these facilities will outlast the mortgage. They accept and even vote to tax themselves in the interest of building venerable institutions that demonstrate pride of place. Leaders can be quickly purged from office when they lose the public trust by wasting tax dollars or destroying public architecture that was sold to them as a legacy investment. Public museums confront a cultural crisis when their governing boards change the rules to suit personal taste. Undermining the inherent logic of how they direct their funds toward the public good is a claim of representation, and they occupy their positions of leadership at the will of the public. When they demonstrate leadership in the public interest through reliable public research, transparency, and public process, they will be seen to be acting legitimately on behalf of the community they serve. When claims to authority are based exclusively on the opinions of the leaders, their legitimacy to lead is eroded. When they are perceived to be serving their own interests and tastes, their actions will be considered a misdirection of public resources, and they find themselves on the wrong end of the pitchforks. The Citizens Brigade to Save LACMA has failed to bring down the leadership of an institution, primarily because the campaign misdirected its critique. They failed to deconstruct the central issues of rationality, heritage merit, and opportunity cost. When leadership finds itself accused of Machiavellian tactics, the right to continued leadership is imperiled. Museum leaders should tread this ground with care because a legitimation crisis can lose the loyalty of its service community, and the result will destroy reputations, careers, and bring to heel our most venerated institutions. John Fraser, Editor (johnf@knology.org) is a conservation psychologist, architect, and the President & CEO of Knology Ltd., a social science research institute based in the USA.

Globalisation and global governance mean that private actors are involved in public regulation and decision-making processes. Companies in particular are experiencing an increase in power that goes far beyond mere economic indicators; that is, they are also gaining political and normative power. This book examines the opportunities and challenges that result from this, which are particularly evident in the field of international human rights. Public human rights are being challenged by the political and normative power of private actors. This does not only change human rights and global governance actors, but also requires a new perspective on both the private and public spheres. This book therefore develops a perspective on the hybrid, societal roles of companies, which form a third domain situated between and simultaneously beyond the public and private spheres.

Across Western democracies, the public sector has undergone significant changes following successive waves of marketisation. Such changes find material expression in an organisation’s logic and associated vocabulary. While marketisation may be adopted, a growing body of research explains how it is often resisted as public sector professionals reject its logic and vocabulary. We contribute to this debate by detailing additional, theoretically important responses. Rather than simply rejecting or adopting both the logic and vocabulary of marketisation, this article shows how UK museum professionals decouple these. Our analysis shows how museum professionals either fashion generic market vocabulary (e.g. customer, value) to pursue local projects or sustain terms such as public and culture to cling to longer-standing ideals of publicness. Partly because of the nature of cultural goods, we propose the museum sector as a paradigm case to illustrate this phenomenon, but our argument has broader implications for the public sphere.

Reviewed by: Verzeichnis der verkauften Gemälde im deutschsprachigen Raum vor 1800 Alessa Johns and Michael Yonan Thomas Ketelsen and Tilmann von Stockhausen , Verzeichnis der verkauften Gemälde im deutschsprachigen Raum vor 1800, edited by Burton B. Fredericksen and Julia I. Armstrong, assisted by Michael Müller. 3 volumes (Los Angeles: The Provenance Index of the Getty Research Institute, and Munich: K. G. Saur, 2002). Pp. 2397. $600.00. Although they'll rarely confess it, most art historians concern themselves only parenthetically with the provenance of artworks. Exactly how a painting became associated with Watteau despite its tenuous links to the artist's circle, or how another shifted from being a David to a Drouais, are problems generally addressed by museum professionals instead of their university-based colleagues. Yet the reception and distribution of art have important histories, crucially so for understanding their cultural significance over time and the interpretations they supported. For these reasons provenance indices should be a more vital part of the art historian's library, yet books like Thomas Ketelsen and Tilmann von Stockhausen's colossal Verzeichnis der verkauften Gemälde im deutschsprachigen Raum vor 1800 are precisely the kind that are overlooked. The authors offer a cross-referenced compendium of listings from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German auction catalogues with a full critical introduction. Perusing this work yields plentiful insights into the economic dimension of art in eighteenth-century Germany, including how paintings were assessed and evaluated, the marketplaces through which they traveled, notions of taste and value, and how collections correlated with social, political, and cultural developments. The Verzeichnis presents a rich picture of a vibrant artistic world whose extent and complexity will likely surprise many scholars accustomed to thinking of art in Central Europe as strictly second tier. As Burton Fredericksen notes in his foreword, the art market cannot be defined as easily for German-speaking Europe as it can for England and France. In contrast to Paris and London, where exceptionally concentrated populations [End Page 347] enabled a thriving art trade, German-speaking Europe remained too politically disorganized and fragmented to develop a wide-scale, centralized public art discourse. The most vibrant local art markets emerged through trade with and in geographic proximity to major foreign cities; Hamburg's art market, for example, developed through sustained engagement with Amsterdam, while Frankfurt am Main relied heavily on nearby Paris to infuse it with goods. The development of localized proto-marketplaces like these paralleled the rise of the auction as a mode of distribution. Auctions in Germany originally were reserved for books, but by the late seventeenth century came to include diverse luxury objects including paintings. Since auctions generated a paper trail in the form of catalogues, public announcements, and protocols, we are generally better informed about them than other kinds of German artistic practices, an important fact since German artistic culture is comparatively poorly documented. The information assembled by Ketelsen and von Stockhausen is therefore of great interest to scholars of eighteenth-century art, and not just those researching provenances. The Verzeichnis is a coproduction of the Getty Research Institute's Provenance Index and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, one of Germany's major museums and home to an extensive library of early auction catalogues. It is the latest in a series of provenance publications sponsored by the Getty and the first to focus on Germany; their goal is nothing less than to publish the contents of every known auction catalogue in German-speaking Europe issued between 1600 and 1800. In casting their net this wide, the authors have updated our knowledge of the German art market well beyond that provided by Frits Lugt's four-volume Répertoire des catalogues de ventes (1938), the longtime standard resource for researchers. Their activities have brought to light some 200 additional catalogues, many of them unexamined since the eighteenth century. The authors' decision to concentrate on German-speaking territories has allowed them to include all known auctions that occurred within the modern boundaries of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, as well as a number of auctions in Warsaw and Prague. For reasons of space, however, the authors abandoned their original plan to include Scandinavia, although a fully searchable...

Accompanying developments in communication technologies and practices, new possibilities emerge for actors to participate in public debate on political issues. While the influence of traditional mass media on public opinion formation processes in the public sphere has been firmly established, the rise of digital media adds complexity to communication processes that are only beginning to be understood. This research aims to add to the understanding of how social media contributes to the normative goals of the public sphere. Much of the research at the nexus of digital media and the public sphere focuses on extraordinary issues or events such as revolutions or electoral politics, leaving a gap as to how everyday political issues are discussed and debated in a hybrid media context. This research addresses that gap by examining a non-sensational policy issue – bikesharing – in two public sphere arenas. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses of print media and Twitter texts are applied to compare and contrast these two mediums across three cases. This comparative approach using the German, North American, and Spanish cases offers insight into the role of social media in different traditional media systems. The findings indicate that while framing of the issue of bikesharing in print media is commonly reflected on Twitter, the reverse is seldom the case. Frame and issue spill-over from Twitter to print media was only found in the North American case, where the meaning of bikesharing represents the largest departure from the status-quo. Political and cultural contextual factors led print media frames to go unchallenged on Twitter in the Spanish case and the debate was channeled through a stronger political logic in the German case. There was an observed preference for obtrusive issue attributes when legitimizing positions for or against bikesharing on Twitter, suggesting a bias for experience-based rationale on that medium. Social media does not have a unified effect on the legitimacy and efficacy of the public sphere, rather political and cultural factors influence the role of social media in public debate as well as the efficacy of social media to help impact political decisions.

It is a basic undertaking amongst museum professionals who work with various aspects of a collection’s meaning, interpretation and history to explore the biography of a historical museum object. This article attempts to depart from this by conceptualizing historical, ethnographic objects as ‘collecting devices’. The focus is thereby shifted from the historiography of an ethnographic object to the ways in which an object and its history can be employed as a device in staging new empirical fields for the museum anthropologist. This points toward potentials inherent to the ethnographic museum, namely the possibility that museum professionals and visitors alike can employ ethnographic objects as a means of encountering people outside the museum and everyday social world that they inhabit.

Indigenous Australians make up only 2.5 percent of the Australian population and have historically had limited opportunity to influence public debate or policy. This has led to many Indigenous people feeling democratically disconnected from the broader Australian society. Despite this, since 1938 more than 35 publications have been produced by Indigenous Australians and those with an interest in Indigenous affairs, yet very little research has been carried out to establish how and why these newspapers were produced or what they achieved. Similarly, little is known about the role Indigenous print media in establishing and developing an Indigenous public sphere. This thesis seeks to bridge these gaps. The thesis investigates the nature of an Indigenous public sphere in Australia, and aims to provide both an historic and journalistic understanding of how and why these newspapers existed with an insight into the people who produced the newspapers, the problems they faced and the journalistic techniques that they employed to achieve their very diverse aims. A three-phase research approach was undertaken. A series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with Indigenous print media producers and contributors. A general textual analysis was then undertaken of a wide range of Indigenous publications accessed through Australian libraries and universities. Finally, available archival materials relating to the organisations and individuals involved in the production of Indigenous publications were analysed. The data gathered was then evaluated using the qualitative analytical software program, Nvivo. The study reveals Indigenous public spheres have always existed and since 1938 Indigenous print media have played a significant role in their development. This study suggests the broader Indigenous public sphere consists of a series of overlapping spheres that are themselves made up of layers. The tiered construction of Indigenous public spheres limits the access individuals may have to public sphere processes and therefore influences engagement with Indigenous public spheres. Another key conclusion drawn by this investigation is that Indigenous public sphere processes are not static and have transitioned through different stages since 1938. This transition has occurred in response to stimuli from both within and outside the Indigenous community.

In highly ideologized societies, such as socialist-era Serbia, every form of activity was officially declared as the result of the consensual free will of conscious participants. From a discursive perspective, ethnographic museum work also represented a kind of prism through which curators, experts, and institutional leadership set the tone and value framework for interpreting the folk culture of traditional communities. Looking back, this ideologically influenced system of professional selection, documentation, consideration, and subsequent representation within ethnographic museum practices can, from today’s perspective, be viewed as a form of ethnographic museum folklore. This so-called museum (ethnographic) folklore emerged and was maintained within a small yet, authoritative and informal social group of curators operating within the cultural heritage protection system. Recognizing the need for research into this phenomenon, as well as the initial hypothesis on the existence of such a form of folkloric activity, could be further considered within the broader context of motives, goals, and outcomes that characterized the processes of retraditionalization among various social groups during late socialism, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the ongoing transition period.