Book description
"We live in a museum age," writes Steven Conn in Do
Museums Still Need Objects? And indeed, at the turn of the
twenty-first century, more people are visiting museums than ever
before. There are now over 17,500 accredited museums in the United
States, averaging approximately 865 million visits a year, more than
two million visits a day. New museums have proliferated across the
cultural landscape even as older ones have undergone transformational
additions: from the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan in New York to
the High in Atlanta and the Getty in Los Angeles. If the golden age of
museum-building came a century ago, when the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Philadelphia Museum
of Art, the Field Museum of Natural History, and others were created,
then it is fair to say that in the last generation we have witnessed a
second golden age.
By closely observing the cultural, intellectual, and political
roles that museums play in contemporary society, while also delving
deeply into their institutional histories, historian Steven Conn
demonstrates that museums are no longer seen simply as houses for
collections of objects. Conn ranges across a wide variety of museum
types-from art and anthropology to science and commercial
museums-asking questions about the relationship between museums and
knowledge, about the connection between culture and politics, about
the role of museums in representing non-Western societies, and about
public institutions and the changing nature of their constituencies.
Elegantly written and deeply researched, Do Museums Still Need
Objects? is essential reading for historians, museum
professionals, and those who love to visit museums.
"Steven Conn offers a refreshing look at museums and many of
the debates surrounding their development and practices over the past
forty years. He is right to frame his inquiry by asking if museums
still need objects. Too often these debates have ignored the very
characteristic that defines museums and distinguishes them from all
other cultural institutions: they collect, preserve, and present
things. This is an important, timely book."-James Cuno, President
and Director, Art Institute of Chicago
Steven Conn is the author of Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with
the Presence of the Past, also available from the University of
Pennsylvania Press. To listen to a podcast interview with Steven Conn,
visit the Penn Press podcast web site.
