Abstract
According to Hou Hanru, the award-winning curator and Director of Exhibitions for the San Francisco Art Institute, the central issue in current artistic and cultural debates within museum studies is the question of how the local and the global interact and are implicated in one another. Rather than seeing the local and the global as “two sides of the same coin,” as Hanru contends they should be seen, many museums are currently caught up in debates that posit the local and global as antagonistic and unable to exist simultaneously.1 As Mark Rectanus points out, many museum scholars, directors, and curators disagree about the status of global contexts and local meanings of artworks and their presentation within museums. Some believe that the “translatability” of artworks from the local or national to a transnational or even global context is of the utmost importance; others defend the need to preserve an artwork’s locality, its local and national context, in order to prevent it from becoming a “signifier of cultural politics” on the global level.2 Museums throughout the world are currently undergoing architectural, administrative, and curatorial transformations that will make them more accessible to the global public. These transformations allow for new networks of exchange and collaboration, but they also “challenge and re-map the relations between culture, identity, and nation.”3
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Notes
Hou Hanru, “Initiatives, Alternatives: Notes in a Temporary and Raw State,” in How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age, ed. Vasif Kortun and Hanru Hou (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2003), 36–39, 36. Cited in
Mark Rectanus, “Globalization: Incorporating the Museum,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon MacDonald (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006), 381–397, 381.
See Eric Jarosinski, “Architectural Symbolism and the Rhetoric of Transparency: A Berlin Ghost Story,” Journal of Urban History 29, no.1 (November 2002): 62–77; and
Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (New York and London, UK: Routledge, 2005).
On the connections between spectrality, memory, and Berlin see Brian Ladd’s The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and
Janet Ward, Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity (New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Lutz Koepnick, Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 240–262.
This is in contrast, say, to the total blocking from public view of the front façade of the former Nazi Reichsbank, which is now hidden behind the substitute façade of the more democratically acceptable entrance building for the Federal Foreign Office. See Janet Ward, “Re-Capitalizing Berlin,” in The German Wall: Fallout in Europe, ed. Marc Silberman (New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 79–98.
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© 2014 Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Janet Ward
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Graves, T. (2014). Berlin’s Museum Island: Marketing the German National Past in the Age of Globalization. In: Diefendorf, J.M., Ward, J. (eds) Transnationalism and the German City. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137390172_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137390172_14
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