Destination Culture by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Destination Culture by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

"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.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Professor of Performance Studies and of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.

SKU	Non disponible
ISBN 13	9780520209664
ISBN 10	0520209664
Titre	Destination Culture
Auteur	Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
État	Non disponible
Type de reliure	Paperback
Éditeur	University of California Press
Année de publication	1998-09-05
Nombre de pages	348
Note de couverture	La photo du livre est présentée à titre d'illustration uniquement. La reliure, la couverture ou l'édition réelle peuvent varier.
Note	Non disponible