Why read Inside the Lost Museum?

Book cover of Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present

Book description

Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our senses and orchestrate our impressions, balancing presentation and preservation, information…

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Anthropology

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Why read it?

1 author picked Inside the Lost Museum as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Gail Levin

Author

I like this book’s discussion of curators as one of two “sources of truth.”

It mentions “curatorial knowledge” and “provenance research,” but also mentions “donors and people associated with the collection.”

With such subjects, there exists a huge area for administrative abuse: for example, those who engage curators/scholars to do provenance research and then dismiss it if not what the museum expected or intended.

Yet this book states, and I agree: “Cataloguing takes deep expertise and time.” So this book brings up some of the pitfalls curators can experience.

From Gail's list on the fate of the Edward Hopper Estate.