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Treasures in the Trash: Transmuting Value

September 23, 2019 by Museum Fatigue

Every semester that I teach museum anthropology we begin with few weeks of discussion and analysis of collecting and value. During this period we look at the impulse to collect, the way objects are given value in sociocultural contexts and how this happens through social practices. This past weekend I came upon a great little short documentary which  tells the story of a discerning sanitation worker—a connoisseur of trash—who rescues pieces he identifies as potentially valuable, and brings them together […]

Categories: Collecting, Museums, Museums, Exhibitions and Representation, Value • Tags: garbage, trash

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Hall of Heroes Superhero Museum

November 30, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

The holiday weekend has given me a little extra time to go through images from last summer’s midwestern road trip—including the Hall of Heroes Superhero Museum. Before much more time passes I thought I should get images up on my Flickr feed and at least make a short post here. The museum is located in a two-story structure behind the owner’s home in the outskirts of Elkhardt, Indiana. It is not just any structure, but built in a form of […]

Categories: Collecting, Museums, Popular Culture • Tags: action figures, cabinet of curiosity, collectibles, collections, comic book collector, comic books, Hall of Heroes, Stan Lee, superheroes

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The Egyptian Statue That Looks Like Michael Jackson

August 20, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Tell me this doesn’t look like him. Many years ago I took a photo of a sculpture in the Egyptian exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum that I thought looked a lot like Michael Jackson. I occasionally insert it into lectures in my museum class to add a moment of levity, but for some time now I have needed a much higher quality image. On my return visit this month I located the bust and took a much clearer and higher-resolution […]

Categories: Museums • Tags: Egypt, Field Museum, King of Pop, Michael Jackson, statue, time travel

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Representationally Hacking a “Life Group” at the Royal Ontario Museum

August 9, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

You have a phrase called “Golden Age.” We do not want to be depicted the way were were, when we were first discovered in our homeland in North America. We do not want museums to continue to present us as something from the past. We believe we are very, very much here now, and we are going be very important in the future. —George Erasmus, Chief, Assembly First Nations 1992. While visiting the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) this past August […]

Categories: Exhibitions and Representation, Museums, Mythologies • Tags: display, first nations, hacks, life group, Mohawk, native peoples, Royal Ontario Museum

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Mummy or Corpse?

August 3, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

For years the Field Museum in Chicago has had the desiccated naked body of a child on display—at child viewing level no less—in their Inside Ancient Egypt exhibit. For over a decade I have used this as an example in lectures in my Museums, Exhibitions and Representations class as an example of the power of museums to reframe objects. Put a dead body on the street and the police will be looking for a murderer, put it behind glass in a […]

Categories: Bodies, Exhibitions and Fairs, Exhibitions and Representation, Museums, Objects of Power, Representation • Tags: Ancient Egypt, Chicago, children, corpse, display, Egypt, Field Museum, Field Museum in Chicago, mummy, museum object

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The Mini Museum: An Alchemy of Value

February 20, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

How small can an object be and still have value? How can a valuable object be fragmented to the point of destruction—where each individual piece is so small as to be nearly valueless—and yet when collected together with other basically valueless fragments become something completely different—something more valuable? The formula is a strange alchemy of division which might look something like this: Valuable object —> valueless fragments —> combined with other fragments —> more valuable collection An interesting Kickstarter, The Mini […]

Categories: Collecting, Material Culture, Museums, Value • Tags: Celeste Olalquiaga, collection, Hans Fex, Kickstarter, Mini Museum, reliquary

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Bringthemback.org’s Cheeky Response to the Parthenon Marbles Controversy

January 26, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

If you want to see the Parthenon, you go to the Athenian Acropolis. If you want to see the sculptures, however, you have to go to the British Museum. For two hundred years this has been one of the most visible legacies of the “Age of Imperial Collection.” (Of course nearly every museum has objects collected from others under unequal power relations—“missing pieces” that match “holes” all over the world from which they were taken.) Last week a colleague of […]

Categories: Collecting, Empire, Museums, Objects of Power • Tags: Athenian Acropolis, Athens, Big Ben, bringthemback.org, Elgin Marbles, Parthenon, Parthenon Marbles, Parthenon Sculptures, the British Museum, vandalism

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Yungang Grottoes: The Missing Pieces Meet The Big Holes

August 15, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Oh, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece Hi-dee-ho, here I go lookin’ for my missin’ piece –The Missing Piece (Shel Silverstein, 1976) This afternoon I was doing some cataloging of images when I came across a folder from a few years back. In it I found a few photos from the Yungang Grottoes—a collection of ancient carved buddhist grottoes just outside the city of Datong in Northern China. Every year that I take student […]

Categories: China, Collecting, Museums, Photo Essays, Representation, Tourism • Tags: chinese sculpture, collections, cultural property, Cultural Revolution, Datong, Met, Metropolitan Museum of Art, sculpture, shel silverstein, unesco world heritage site, vandalism, Yungang Grottoes,云冈石窟

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The Mona Lisa: Art in the Age of Digital Consumption

August 3, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

The Mona Lisa is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable images in the world. Perhaps second only to the Eiffel Tower, it is an icon of the tourist experience of Paris. So, when we arrived at the Louvre with thousands of other tourists, of course, the first thing we did was go to see it. I have heard that often when tourists first see the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre, the portrait is much smaller than they expect. The idea, […]

Categories: Museums, Random Reflections, Tourism, Video clips, Visual Anthropology • Tags: art, Mona Lisa, Photography, Pierre Bourdieu, tourism, visual anthropology, Walter Benjamin

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Jinling Buddhist Publishing House (金陵刻经处)

June 21, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

This morning I was invited by some of the folks that have been helping me with my research to go on a trip to visit the Jinling Buddhist Publishing House (jinling kejing chu) in downtown Nanjing. I can’t really say that I am that interested in ancient Buddhist texts, but I was looking forward to seeing how they carve the wooden blocks, print and bind books in the classical way. It takes nearly a month to carve one panel and […]

Categories: Museums, Video clips • Tags: Buddhism, buddhist texts, China

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