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	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780520209664
ISBN 10	0520209664
Title	Destination Culture
Author	Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of California Press
Year published	1998-09-05
Number of pages	348
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable