A Living Exhibition: The Smithsonian and the Transformation of the Universal Museum

Notes

231 Notes Introduction: The Changing Universal Museum 1. For background on the creation of the National Museum of the American Indian, see Amy Lonetree and Amanda J. Cobb, eds., The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). On the ways in which NMAI and other indigenous efforts to transform museums have had a profound influence on the field, see Susan Sleeper Smith, ed., Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); and W. Richard West Jr. et al., The Changing Presentation of the American Indian: Museums and Native Cultures (Seattle: National Museum of the American Indian in association with University of Washington Press, 2000). For a fascinating exploration of revolutionary change in museums see Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, and Sheila Watson, eds., Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed (New York: Routledge, 2007). For an interesting critique of the National Museum of the American Indian and a counterpoint to prevailing attitudes toward cultural exhibition and museum anthropology, see Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 38–45. 2. See, for example, “Room for Debate: Should We Have a National Latino Museum?” New York Times, April 26, 2011, www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate /2011/04/26/should-we-have-a-national-latino-museum; and Steven Pearlstein, “Why Not a Museum for American Ingenuity?” Washington Post, Feb. 20, 2012, www .washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-not-a-museum-for-american -ingenuity/2012/02/20/gIQAXDsiPR_print.html. See also Fath Davis Ruffins, “Culture Wars Won and Lost: Ethnic Museums on the Mall,” Radical History Review 68, 70 (Spring 1997, Winter 1998), two-part article. 3. Universal museums faced such intense criticism from various quarters that the directors of the Louvre; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the Prado; the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; the Whitney; and several others issued a “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums: ‘Museums Serve Every Nation,’” in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 12, 2002. Reprinted in Ivan Karp, Corrine A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, eds., Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global 232 NOTES TO PAGES 2–5 Transformations (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 247–49. For another vigorous defense of universal museums, see James Cuno, Whose Culture?: The Promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 17, 27–28. 4. For a thoughtful exploration of this debate, see Kanishk Tharoor, “Will the Museum of the Future Be Universal or Defined by Its Borders?” The National, May 12, 2002, www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/art/will-the-museum-of-the-future-be -universal-or-defined-by-its-borders. For a comparative international perspective on national museums, see Darryl McIntyre and Kirsten Wehner, eds., NationalMuseums: Negotiating Histories (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2001). 5. For a brief, but insightful history of public museums, see Jeffrey Abt, “The Origins of the Public Museum,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 115–34. 6. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5–6. 7. Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 123–54. See also Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995). 8. Curtis M. Hinsley Jr., The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). Originally published as Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981). Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 9. H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 10. Corinne A. Kratz and Ciraj Rassool, “Remapping the Museum,” in Karp et al., Museum Frictions, 347–56. 11. Randolph Starn, “A Historian’s Brief Guide to New Museum Studies,” American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (Feb. 2005). An encouraging development was the creation of the Museum History Journal by Left Coast Press in 2008. Several edited collections provide useful overviews of the history and theory of museums. See, for example, Macdonald, A Companion to Museum Studies, and Gail...