Curator: The Museum Journal最新文献

Lion Attacking a Dromedary (LAD) is an extraordinarily controversial example of 19th century taxidermy and storytelling that brings into focus the challenges of museum operations as inclusive spaces in the 21st century. Recently commemorated in objects such as snow globes and coffee table books, this diorama has been on continuous display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in the USA since it was acquired at the turn of the 20th century. While the diorama has undergone small changes and moved across multiple locations, the values and beliefs of museums, their users, and detractors have changed radically. This issue revisits a very specific example of a controversial asset that includes human remains to consider the complexity of representation and artifact for the 21st century.

The diorama was originally created in Paris, France for the 1867 Exposition Universelle by the Verreaux brothers, heirs to the 19th-century Maison Verreaux taxidermy studio. The 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle was a typical world's fair, a festival where a host country like France could display its might, wealth, cultural values, and status as an imperial global power. Like many other world's fairs in the industrializing western world, the Paris fair displayed what was considered at the time to be the finest art and most advanced technology from Europe and the United States. World's fairs were considered a celebration of modernity and progress.

These world's fairs and exhibitions, frequently displayed depictions of other cultures and peoples that the dominant settler cultures of Europe and the Americas viewed as uncivilized or primitive, relegating them to an exotic “other.” The peoples depicted through this lens were frequently Indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and to a lesser extent, Asia. As an example of this exotic fictionalization of human/animal relationships, this diorama claimed to illustrate the North African world (Figure 1).

The diorama depicts an exaggerated scene of what we take to be a North African man riding a camel that is being attacked by a male lion. The man wears clothing that is a combination of multiple ethnic groups, creating an appearance that audiences from the mid-19th century would read as a non-culturally specific “Arab type.” A female lion lies dead at the camel's feet, presumably having lost the initial conflict with the rider. Though DNA analysis of these types of taxidermized skin is not conclusive, the lions are likely Barbary lions, members of a subspecies of Asiatic lion extirpated from North Africa in the mid-20th century due to over-hunting and habitat destruction.

The mid-1800s witnessed a rise in imports from Asia and the Middle East as imperial colonial nations expanded trade in the early industrial era, leading to a fetishizing of Asia and North Africa as part of an “Orientalist” fashion arising throughout Europe. Despite being characterized as Arab Courier for decades, t

“You believe animals to be wholly deprived of passions” asks the narrator of Balzac's 1836 story, “A Passion in the Desert,” and he adds, “you should know that we can give them all the vices driven by our state of civilization.” It is in the context of Balzac's questioning of animal passion that I would like to consider the striking and passionate expressions shared among the lion, dromedary and human figures in Jules Verreaux' “Lion Attacking a Dromedary.” The denial of animal passion can be understood as a Cartesian legacy that influenced both taxidermy and the illustrations of early natural histories, but would eventually be questioned during the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, Buffon accepted that an animal might be excited or moved by passions, but also wrote that any depiction of that agitation could only distort the representation of a species' essence. During the 19th century, by contrast, both scientific and artistic representations of animals show an increasing interest in animal emotions, even as these would underscore a greater affinity between human and non-human animals, as evidenced by Darwin's 1872 publication of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Balzac's story and Verreaux's taxidermy question to what extent passions humanize animals or bestialize humans, a question with potential relevance, I will argue, for understanding how the vices of civilization might relate to the figure of the human Courier in the exchange of passions.

Lion Attacking a Dromedary was a sensational object for its first viewers at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867. As an entity or thing, it provoked a powerfully visceral response and, as the current essay explores, it remains a difficult object to view or display today. As we now know, the Verreaux brothers embedded human remains in the figure of the rider that had formerly been assumed to be just a clothed mannequin. (I have elected to exclude any image of this controversial diorama containing human and other animal remains because it is not necessary for this theoretical inquiry). This essay suggests that theoretical tools derived from Material Ecocriticism and Monster Theory that may help us to think about, or alongside, the affective power of this disturbing taxidermy assemblage, ever aware that this piece draws its power from the theatrical, colonial violence of extraction and extinction.

Unlike the vast majority of large-scale showpieces exhibited at nineteenth-century universal exhibitions, Édouard Verreaux's taxidermy group, Lion Attacking a Dromedary, has defied the odds and has survived well past its initial public display in the Tunisian section of the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. In the context of its original ethnographic display in a space dedicated to the promotion of French colonialism, Verreaux's ambitious taxidermy tableau would have been understood as a representation of authentic life in Tunisia. This illusion of authenticity issued from the object's expert mimicking of the period's artistic conventions for depicting the relationship between people and animals in North Africa by artists such as Horace Vernet, Eugène Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and others. Instead of paint or plaster, Verreaux's composition took the form of an uncanny assemblage of body parts taken from a camel, two lions, and an anonymous human: in so doing, Verreaux used the tragic material of living beings to create a literal interpretation of the aesthetic tropes of French orientalism; with this world's fair showpiece, he thus violently bridged the theoretical and material divide between art and life. In this essay, I take these conjunctions between the “real” and the imaginary as a point of departure for discussing the feigned credulity of Lion Attacking a Dromedary. I contend that Verreaux's Lion Attacking a Dromedary should be considered as an imperial tableau, that is, as a didactic object that participated in training nineteenth-century viewers to be what the historian Ariella Azoulay has called “imperial citizens” by drawing equivalences between nature and culture, and between representation and reality.

Alternative Text (AltText) is widely recognized as a key principle of digital accessibility and accessible publishing (PAAG, 2023). It has also been discussed as a creative writing practice (Finnegan & Coklyat, n.d.), and as an access tool for museums and cultural institutions (Wilson, 2011). In the January 2023 issue of Curator: The Museum Journal (Cecilia et al., 2023), we considered the rather fragmented and decadal delays of the museum sector and the sector's peer-reviewed publishers to fully adopt the principles of the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the migration to digital first publishing (Cecilia et al., 2023). In that editorial, we announced that Curator: The Museum Journal has adopted a new policy to increase inclusion in our journal and advocated for wide adoption of that policy throughout the museum sector.

In this Editorial, we broaden our discussion of alternative text or “AltText” as we will be calling it—and more generally the discussion of digital access in scholarly journals by examining it as an institutional, political, and activist tool. Understanding the way professional publishing sector can deploy access tools like AltText provides the foundation on which this journal, Curator: The Museum Journal, will be presenting our framework for structuring accessible content that will benefit authors and readers. The insights gained from our research will allow authors to reflect on the intricate link between images and text and how they work together to illustrate a particular claim. As announced in our January 2023 editorial, we employ Rose's (2012) approach to understand the significance of cultural images, using technological, compositional, and social modalities to discuss images' sites of production, audiencing, the image itself, and the site of its circulation.

In this Editorial, we focus on understanding the site of production and audiencing, reflecting on the complex relationship between authors and potential readership, and the multimodal nature of authorial narratives.

Advocacy to prioritize accessibility from an institutional perspective is not a new phenomenon in the museum sector. The question has been at the forefront of museum publishing since the mid-1980s when physical access to buildings started restructuring our buildings. But even after 40 years of progress, professionals and academics continue to agree on the need for even more sector-wide change. At this writing, 23 years into the 21st century's digital revolution, it has become apparent that there is need for a new focus on how inclusion can permeate processes and operations at all levels.

Our 2022 quick assessment of a sample of the major museum websites and related peer-reviewed publications revealed that the vast majority of the images on museum webpages are without Alt attribute tags to define

Although the high growth of the tourism market contributes to a record number of visitors to landmark museums, they also encounter the overcrowding problem. This study reviewed the case of National Palace Museum (NPM) in Taipei to discuss the overcrowding problem and provide suggestions to alleviate this problem. This study adopted document analysis to summarize NPM's policies regarding the overcrowding problem that were identified by performing text mining of visitors' reviews for the NPM. And a content analysis involving semantic analysis and coding of negative reviews for NPM retrieved from TripAdvisor was performed for extracting complaint categories regarding the overcrowding problem. On the basis of the results, a service operation management framework in response to museum overcrowding is proposed. This study suggests that a museum can manage the overcrowding problem on the basis of visitor characteristics by adjusting visitor demand, optimizing the service design, diverting visitors' flow, elaborating the floor plan and exhibition design, or forming a decentralized museum hub to move must-see exhibits for tourists to a stand-alone pavilion or branch to disperse the crowd.

In recent years, multimodal exhibition practices in which sound appears as a fundamental element have exponentially increased in museums. This phenomenon is based on the recognition that sound is a noteworthy mode to elicit significant museum experiences. Among the various genres, those of sound art and ambiance distinctively convey the idea of social space. In these genres, the spatialization of sound emerges as an outstanding articulator of an idea of space as being socially built according to an understanding that largely transcends Cartesian and Euclidean models. In this study, I discuss the potentialities of sound to construct a space for museum exhibitions based on the idea of space as being socially constructed, as postulated by Lefebvre and Martina Low. The discussion will be supported by the analysis of the exhibitions The Disharmony of Spheres and Stranger than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition.

COVID-19 has highlighted the need for museums to develop policies and practices that allow them to be more responsive to audiences' during a crisis, in many cases pushing them to explore new technologies and approaches. Based on an analysis of the National Museum of Australia and its digital engagement throughout the 2019/2020 bushfire season and the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper identifies a lack of literature to support the need for digital channels to be incorporated in institutional crisis planning. Referencing “Momentous”, a purpose-built website, and two Facebook groups, “Fridge Door Fire Stories” and “Bridging the Distance,” we explore the content shared on these platforms by users and place this in conversation with the reflections of the cultural workers who created and maintained these online platforms. We suggest digital technologies help communities to take a more active role in negotiating how the museum represents their experiences.

The scanning of paleontological collections is increasingly important for morphological studies and science outreach. In addition to ensuring data sharing, digitization contributes to preserving morphological information in case of damage to the original specimens. In this communication, we aim to report digital versions of the holotypes from the Vertebrate Paleontology Collection at the Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, Brazil. For this purpose, eighteen holotypes of Early/Middle Miocene Teleostei from Pirabas Formation, northern Brazil, were scanned using microtomography, and cybertypes were proposed. The CT-Scan data were stored in a virtual repository, can be freely accessed, and are available for future studies on the morphology of these specimens. Furthermore, these specimens are tiny and fragile, and digital versions can be an alternative to safely handling them. Finally, the digitization of important specimens, at least of holotypes, needs to be a standard practice in museum collections over the next years.

In this article, I study curating as a way of producing documents. By looking back retrospectively to the array of documents produced during my art projects and reviewing theoretical approaches relevant to the development of archival documentation, I will discuss how art documents can be constitutive of both knowledge and relations. Art documents help to account of and multiply the knowledge that is mobilized during the making of an exhibition, but they also have performative efficacy as connectors—contributing to reach different audiences, to involve diverse participants, and to bring together dissimilar things. Curation activities demand a proactive documentation and archiving since documents play a key role in consolidating the aesthetic value and relational potential of artworks. As a result, an important part of curation has to be dedicated to documentation.