Extended deadline for submitting paper proposals:
July 20th, 2014
July 20th, 2014
INSTITUTE OF
ETHNOLOGY AND FOLKLORE STUDIES WITH ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM – BAS
has the pleasure to invite you
to the second research conference in the series
has the pleasure to invite you
to the second research conference in the series
DEBATES IN
MUSEOLOGY
on the topic
The Museum and the Society of the
Spectacle
25–26
September 2014, IEFSEM–BAS (Moskovska Str. 6a, Sofia)
After
twenty-five years of transition to market economy and neoliberal democracy museums
in Bulgaria are only now beginning to search for ways to fit in the “society of
the spectacle” in order to be able to compete successfully with the industries
of culture, entertainment and leisure time. What are the strategies that
museums resort to, following the logic of the market, in order to attract more
visitors to their exhibition halls, and thus generate more income? What are, on
the other hand, the implications of the commodification of the cultural values
that museums study, preserve, put on display, interpret? Is it possible to
reconcile the two extremes in the museum’s social mission today – education and
entertainment? And what is the place of the social responsibility of the museum
as an institution of the public sphere in this mission? These are the central
questions that the second research conference in the series “Debates in
Museology” aims to raise and examine.
Even if
insufficiently discussed in our country until now, these questions are far from
novel – since as early as the 1960s “Western” museums have been severely
criticized and charged with accusations in commodification, disneyfication,
commodity fetishism, etc. New Museology, which came out in the 1980s as a
result of the critique of the museum, tried to transform it from a disciplinary
modern institution and a “temple” of consumerism to an arena for public debate,
“contact zone” (James Clifford), “people’s university” (Hugues de Varine), site
of community memory. The very term “society of the spectacle”, introduced by
Guy Debord in the distant 1967, has become a critical metaphor for consumer
society, reducing the political implications of the term and moving away from the
initial call of its author to “wake up” the spectator, drugged by spectacular
images, by constructing so-called “situations” that disrupt and overturn the
order of the spectacle. Similarly to the Situationists, the new museologists aim at “waking up”
the museum visitor by provoking him/her to become aware of the museum context
and from a passive “reader” of the museum text to become an active
co-participant in his/her own museum experience.
“Society
of the spectacle” was preceded by the critique of cultural industry as a means
for “mass deception” in modern society, developed by representatives of the
Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and others in the
1940s. The term continued to produce new interpretations throughout the 1970s
and 80s, as seen in the works of a number of French poststructuralists – Jean
Baudrillard, for instance, examined the substitution of reality in postmodern
society with simulations of reality (“hyperreality”). It is in this context
that we would like to bring up the question of whether critical theory’s contemporary
developments might have a bearing on the making of a new, critical, socially
responsible postmodern museology. The proposed directions for discussing the
topic of the conference gravitate around three core problems: the museum and
the logic of the market; the museum as a spectacle; and the museum as a public
arena.
·
THE MUSEUM AND THE LOGIC OF THE MARKET
Corporate culture and the museum – branding, advertising and marketing
strategies in the museum;
The museum’s competitiveness among the industries of culture,
entertainment and leisure time; the idea of an “all-inclusive” museum
The museum outside the museum – searching for new “museum” spaces
The museum and consumer society – disneyfying and commodifying cultural
heritage in the museum
Issues of authenticity in the museum – original, copy, simulacrum
(Baudrillard)
The exoticising “museum gaze” – back to the Renaissance “cabinets of
curiosities”?
·
THE MUSEUM AS A SPECTACLE
The spectacle of the “Other” in the ethnographic museum
The new media in the museum – mediatizing and virtualizing museum
experience
The “playing man” (homo ludens)
in the museum – games, hands-on activities, workshops, museum theater,
historical re-enactments, etc.
The “affective turn” and the “work of imagination” (Appadurai) in the
museum
Performativity in the museum – the museum text as a performative; the
museum as performative space; the performing body in the museum
The tension between image and text in the museum exhibition
Ethics and aesthetics in the museum
·
THE MUSEUM AS A PUBLIC ARENA
Reconceptualizing the social mission of the museum today – between the
scientific and the popular, between the educational and the amusing, between
the trivial and the scandalous
The social responsibility of the museum as an institution of the public
sphere (Habermas)
The museum visitor – a passive spectator or a (pro)active citizen?
Paper proposals should
include name and institutional affiliation of the participant, e-mail, title of
the proposed paper, and a resume of minimum 1500 characters in Bulgarian
or English. The conference proceedings will be published in a refereed academic
publication.
The working languages of
the conference are Bulgarian and English.
All costs for travel and accommodation
will be covered by the participants.
IMPORTANT DEADLINES
·
Sending paper proposals: June 30th, 2014
·
Informing participants of the acceptance of their
proposal: July 31st, 2014
·
Announcing the preliminary program of the conference:
August 31st, 2014
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Asst. Prof. Svetla Kazalarska, Ph.D.; Asst. Prof.
Elena Vodinchar, Ph.D.; Yana Gergova, Ph.D.; Dimitar Vassilev, Ph.D. student
(ABD)
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