num_pages: 272
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 17500 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 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 typesfrom art and anthropology to science and commercial museumsasking 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.
language: English
title: Do Museums Still Need Objects?
publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press