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The Banality of Everyday Consumption: Collecting Contemporary Urban Materiality
Author(s) -
Mullins Paul R.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
museum anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.197
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1548-1379
pISSN - 0892-8339
DOI - 10.1111/muan.12047
Subject(s) - materiality (auditing) , aesthetics , everyday life , politics , sociology , consumption (sociology) , consciousness , art , epistemology , political science , philosophy , law
This article examines what defines contemporary urban materiality, focusing on the politics of banality and everyday life and examining how museums might collect quotidian material things. Rather than engage in guesswork about what future audiences will define as early 21st‐century urban significance, the article argues for a curatorial focus on the apparently prosaic dimensions of urban materiality. Such a curatorial strategy will use commonplace material things to illuminate the contemporary imagination and social construction of urban life by focusing on the things contemporary people reduce to banality and consign to the boundaries of consciousness. [material culture, consumption, everyday life]