Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert

Re-conceptualizing Museum Audiences: Power, Activity, Responsibility

ABSTRACT This article offers a theoretical overview of how diverse disciplines, such as cultural studies, sociology, philosophy of art, education, and marketing, have contributed to the evolving conceptualization of museum audiences over the past 50 years. Audience research has moved through different paradigms. Every shift in the way audiences are viewed unavoidably influences the way museum professionals view themselves, their role, and the way they interact with their audiences. The most recent audience conceptualization envisions visitors as active interpreters who selectively construct meaning based on their personal experiences, associations, biases, and sense of identity, whereas the museum is envisioned as an open work that is only completed by the visitor. However, certain challenges loom over this new audience conceptualization. It is argued that such visualization underestimates power issues while romanticizing the power of audience activity, thereby ignoring issues of responsibility.

Museums and cultural sustainability: stakeholders, forces, and cultural policies

This paper explores the relationship between museums, cultural sustainability, and cultural policies. Specifically, it offers a theoretical model for the sustainable development of museums and a process for designing appropriate cultural policies for museums with cultural sustainability in mind. The case of Cyprus is used to demonstrate how strengths and gaps in cultural sustainability can be identified within a broader museum environment. The study examines the main stakeholders (the state, municipalities/ communities, and individuals), types of museums (archaeological, art, ethnographic, etc.) they establish and the forces influencing their decisions (such as politics, a sense of national identity, cultural tourism, economic revitalization, and personal agendas) in order to map the Cypriot museum environment and identify the emphasis placed on different parameters of cultural sustainability. By identifying cultural sustainability strengths and gaps on a national level, it becomes easier for cultural policy-makers to design appropriate cultural policies for museums.

Perceiving the art museum

Abstract This paper presents a novel way of understanding art museum visitation based on the examination of peoples perceptions regarding art museums and galleries. Within a discussion of the existing literature, it is argued that both socio-cultural and individual factors influence museum perceptions and visitation decisions. Using in-depth interviews with 60 participants, eight different ways of perceiving the art museum have been identified. These are called ‘museum perceptual filters’ (MPFs), and are as follows: (1) the professional, (2) art-loving, (3) self-exploration, (4) cultural tourism, (5) social visitation, (6) romantic, (7) rejection and (8) indifference filter. By ‘colouring’ our ‘spectacles of perception’, MPFs seem to influence our visitation decisions.

Museotopia: A photographic research project by Ilya Rabinovich

and contravene received ideas that have come to rather confine thinking about the aerial view. Critical writing on the topic often moves to position visuality from above too completely as a ‘conquering gaze’ – the disembodied and distanced viewpoint attributed to masculinist imperial subjects of instrumental reason, from which urban plans might be imposed, bombs dispensed or the steel cage of rationality projected onto the terrain below. For representatives of this line of thought, we might turn to de Certeau’s (1994) elaboration of the ‘scopic drive’ towards control from atop of the World Trade Centre, Paul Virilio’s (1989) work on the imbrication of visual and warfare technologies or even William Blake’s (1979) unforgettable Ancient of Days, in which Urzion splits the clouds to take the measure of the earth with a great compass.

Museums: A visual anthropology

following four chapters show how practitioners of everyday life innovate in their worlds, focusing respectively on self-managed health care (Kyle Kilbourn), hearing (Dennis Day), and moving through the streets (Griet Scheldeman) and designing joysticks for off-road construction vehicles (Max Rolfstam and Jacob Buur). Each chapter shows the experiential moments and contingencies of being part of these social, sensory and material environments. The contributors demonstrate how as a participant and practitioner in health care, hearing, urban movement and operation of construction vehicles, people continually move on, earn and become skilled within and in relation to persons, artefacts and environments. The ‘unfinishedness’ of the designed objects, experiences or services that are part of these environments and activities critiques the idea of designing to change discrete behaviours, in favour of designing to enable people to innovate in everyday life activity.

Resisting Institutional Power: The Women of St. Barnabas

ABSTRACT This article examines the relation between museums exhibiting sacred objects, visitors, and politics. More specifically, it explores the reasons why a minority group of visitors might resist, or even reject, the institutional power of a museum. St. Barnabas Icon Museum, located in the northern part of Cyprus, and a minority group of its visitors—the Women of St. Barnabas—serve as our case study. The two main communities of the island (Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots) perceive the museum in dramatically different ways and use it to support their own claims. The Women of St. Barnabas, a group of Orthodox Christian, Greek Cypriot women, reject the museum and insist on using it as a religious instead of a secular space. The authors argue that apart from religious reasons, political beliefs predominantly shape this groups perceptions and uses of the museum.

Editorial: Photography, artists and museums

This special issue of Photographies is dedicated to the intricate relationship between photography and museums. More specifically, it focuses on artistic practices that use photography to challenge the theoretical complexities of this relationship. The featured papers of this issue examine what happens when artists turn their lens on such museum practices as collecting, archiving, exhibiting and interpreting. Moreover, they investigate how artists negotiate the concept of the museum, its practices and visitors through their photographic work, and the ways in which they often adopt a curatorial position by using real and/or fictional photographic archives. The papers in this issue were selected from the 2nd International Conference of Photography and Theory, which took place in 2012 at the Thalassa Museum in Agia Napa, Cyprus. The International Conference of Photography and Theory (ICPT) is a biannual conference, which takes place in Cyprus and was originally created as a response to expanding research in historical, artistic and vernacular photography. It aims to provide an outlet for an interdisciplinary and critical theoretical exploration of photography and photographic practices. The theme of the 2nd ICPT was “Photography and Museums” and aimed to critically investigate the diverse relationships between photography and museums. Photography obviously has a long and complex relationship with the museum as well as different functions within and outside its walls. To begin with, photography is displayed in museums as an autonomous artefact or an art form demanding aesthetic consideration. Additionally, photography has been historically adopted by various types of museums — anthropological, historical, archaeological, science etc. — as evidence for the objects on view or as supporting documents to events, stories or other artefacts already on display. Furthermore, museums use photography as a tool for documenting, archiving and facilitating museum practices, and for self-promotion. Finally, visitor photography of museum collections, interiors, exteriors and even of other visitors — often circulating online through social media — has expanded the dissemination of museum images. Despite the close relationship and interdependency of museums and photography, there is limited research that examines the roles that photography plays in the formation of cultural, historic or social narratives inside museums. In addition, museums, and also contemporary artists, have been showing a renewed interest in photography and its potential to challenge museum orthodoxy, as well as in the medium’s expanding possibilities through the use of new media technologies. ICPT 2012 explored the import of photography on the nature and character of the museum, the relationship between photography and the museum experience, as well as the impact of the institution on the status and development of photography. The call