Its 300-year history apparently came to an end with the eccentric collectors of the baroque age, when scientific thinking and rationalism took over. But in recent years the cabinet of curiosities has reappeared in exhibitions in Europe and America and in international colloquia on university campuses, while reemerging as a source of inspiration for interior decorators and contemporary artists.This spectacular and ingenious book traces the history of these "rooms of wonders, " from their first appearance in the inventories and engravings commissioned by Renaissance nobles such as the Medici and the Hapsburgs, via those of the Dane Ole Wurm and the Italian polymath Athanasius Kircher, to the cabinets of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists Elias Ashmole and Levinas Vincent.Much was genuinely scientific: minerals, fossils, stuffed and preserved animals and plants. Some items were merely curious, or even grotesque -- freaks of nature, monstrous births, insects in amber. The artificial or man-made was equally prominent -- wax effigies, death masks, specimens of almost incredible ingenuity (such as carvings on cherry-stones), or mechanical automata that imitated living things. The fascination of curiosities lies in their combination: they represent a stage of human inquiry in which imagination had not been divorced from reason.Patrick Mauries reconstructs these rooms of wonders as they were in their heyday and illustrates many of the most exotic items they contained, as well as the fewcomplete interiors that survive. He begins with the totality of the collection, the "theater of the world, " the whole sum of human knowledge gathered together in one room. He then examines the cabinets that contained and categorized the objects. Next he opens them to reveal the extraordinary melange of curiosities, specimens, and works of art. He looks at the personalities of the collectors themselves, from great princes to humble scholars, and finally at the modern revival of the cabinet of curiosity.

    It is a necessary tool for the fashion industry, schools, and libraries." —Women's Wear Daily "An iconography of textile motifs and a vocabulary of pattern. . . . Highly recommended." —Choice Never before have printed textiles been celebrated in a book of this magnitude. Now in paperback, Textile Designs is the indispensable sourcebook for the colorful patterned materials that have been used in fashion and interiors for the past 200 years. Organized not chronologically or geographically but by motif—Floral, Geometric, Conversational, Ethnic, and Art Movements and Period Styles—this bible of textile design presents a stunning cross-section of the materials of everyday life: printed calicos and cottons, flowered cretonnes and chintzes, polka-dot silks and foulards. With its informative text and pattern names provided not only in English but also in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, this is a must-have for everyone interested in color and pattern.

    Chihuly is credited with introducing fine-art collectors and new fans to an art form that is almost 5,000 years old. Photographs of natural light playing on the brilliant colors and unique shapes of Chihuly's work survey his memorable outdoor installations around the globe. Vintage postcards from Chihuly's archives and images from his exhibition at the historic Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago round out this pictorial collection. Quotes from the artist and thoughtful essays provide a backdrop for his work as well as a glimpse into the Chihuly process.

    Eichstedt and Stephen Small investigated this question in Virginia, Georgia, and Louisiana by touring more than one hundred plantation museums; twenty locations organized and run by African Americans; and eighty general history sites. Their findings indicate that the experience and legacy of slavery is still inadequately presented within the larger discourse surrounding race, racism, and national identity.The vast majority of slavery sites construct narratives of history that valorize a white elite of the pre-emancipation South and trivialize the experience of slavery for both enslaved people and their enslavers. Through systematic analysis of richly textured data, the authors of Representations of Slavery have developed a typology of primary representational/discursive strategies used to discuss slavery and the enslaved. They clearly demonstrate how these strategies are linked to representations and practices in the larger social and political arenas.Eichstedt and Small found counter narratives at sites organized and staffed by African Americans, and a small number of white-organized sites have made efforts to incorporate African American experiences of slavery as part of their presentations. But the predominant framework of the “white-centric exhibition narrative” persists, and the authors draw from contemporary literature on racialization, museums, cultural studies, and collective memory to make a case for public debate and intervention.

    Stille explores not simply the past, but our ideas about the past—and how they will have to change if our past is to have a future.

    Monotheistic religions, scientific theories, and contemporary arts have struggled with the contradictory urge to produce and also destroy images and emblems. Moving beyond the image wars, "ICONOCLASH" shows that image destruction has always coexisted with a cascade of image production, visible in traditional Christian images as well as in scientific laboratories and the various experiments of contemporary art, music, cinema, and architecture.While iconoclasts have struggled against icon worshippers, another history of "iconophily" has always been at work. Investigating this alternative to the Western obsession with image worship and destruction allows useful comparisons with other cultures, in which images play a very different role. "ICONOCLASH" offers a variety of experiments on how to "suspend" the iconoclastic gesture and to renew the movement of images against any freeze-framing.The book includes major works by Art & Language, Willi Baumeister, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Buren, Lucas Cranach, Max Dean, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Durer, Lucio Fontana, Francisco Goya, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Young Hay, Arata Isozaki, Asger Jorn, Martin Kippenberger, Imi Knoebel, Komar & Melamid, Joseph Kosuth, Gordon Matta-Clark, Tracey Moffat, Nam June Paik, Sigmar Polke, Stephen Prina, Man Ray, Sophie Ristelhueber, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and many others.

    From Absolut Vodka’s sponsorship of art shows to ABN-AMRO Bank’s branding of Van Gogh’s self-portrait to advertise its credit cards, we have borne witness to a new sort of patronage, in which the marriage of individual talent with multinational marketing is beginning to blur the comfortable old distinctions between public and private.Chin-tao Wu’s book is the first concerted attempt to detail the various ways in which business values and the free-market ethos have come to permeate the sphere of the visual arts since the 1980s. Charting the various shifts in public policy which first facilitated the entry of major corporations into the cultural sphere, it analyses the roles of governments in injecting the principles of the free market into public arts agencies—in particular the Arts Council in Great Britain and the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA. It goes on to study the corporate take-over of art museums, highlighting the ways in which ‘cultural capital’ can be garnered by various social and business ‘elites’ through commercial involvement in the arts, and shows how corporations have succeeded in integrating themselves into the infrastructure of the art world itself by showcasing contemporary art in their own corporate premises.Mapping for the first time the increasingly hegemonic position that corporations and corporate elites have come to occupy in the cultural arena, this is a provocative contribution to the debate on public culture in Britain and America.

    Dan learns to interpret the symbols and the mysteries of art.

    The Museum of the City of New York, in partnership with the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and a group of local Arab and non-Arab scholars, activists and educators, undertook a long overdue exploration of New York's Arab populations. The result is a revealing collection of writings and photographs that document and tell the stories of these communities.

    This repatriation campaign has become hugely significant in universities and museums where human remains uncovered through archaeological excavation have been retained for the scientific study of past populations.This book will be invaluable to those involved in the collection and repatriation of remains and cultural objects to indigenous groups.

    Beginning with Franz Boas, anthropologists have written extensively about the rich material culture of the Kwakwaka'wakw and have long collected their intricately detailed storage boxes, totem poles, and elaborate ceremonial wear. But how did the relationship between these two groups contribute to transform both ordinary and ritual objects into ethnological specimens, and then to works of art proudly displayed in museums? This expansive books is an anthropology of anthropology. Ira Jacknis identifies not only the effects of cross-cultural exchanges but also examines anthropology itself as a cultural process. He considers as well how museums define and present Native art and how their choices in turn influence current Native artists. The book offers a valuable collection of 131 halftones, ranging from nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs to catalog images from the American Museum of Natural History to documentary photographs taken by Jacknis in the 1980s. Together with Jacknis's close account of this classic chapter in anthropological history, they vividly show how the "anthropological encounter" is in fact an extraordinarily complex and fluid relationship.

    Questions regarding curatorial power and authorship, as well as how external pressures and challenges shape exhibitions, were addressed by participants including Robert Storr, Senior Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Thelma Golden, Deputy Director of exhibitions, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Curator, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate Gallery, London.

    This volume offers a comprehensive, illustrated guide to the almost one hundred homes, libraries, and museums that honor the American presidents - from George Washington to George W. Bush.

    The focus of this book is on pollutants in the museum environment, their sources, how they can harm works of art, and what to do about it.