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Museums as Media in the Emergent Global Context
Author(s) -
Levin Miriam R.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
curator: the museum journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.312
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 2151-6952
pISSN - 0011-3069
DOI - 10.1111/j.2151-6952.2006.tb00197.x
Subject(s) - witness , happening , face (sociological concept) , globalization , context (archaeology) , media studies , sociology , history , environmental ethics , aesthetics , political science , social science , art , law , art history , archaeology , philosophy , performance art
The papers, participants, presentations, and discussions that serve as the source of this special issue of Curator: The Museum Journal bear witness to the fact that museums are not only places to which something radical, even traumatic is currently happening. They are participants, and essentially agents of change, in the stressful, shifting ecology of globalization that has unmoored whole economies, regions and populations. Fundamentally, they are a form of media, in the sense defined by the Oxford English Dictionary. This article summarizes the challenges museums face in pursuing their mission as media, and ends with a few remarks about the need to turn some attention in the future to the topic of research.