The Politics of cultural programming in public spaces / edited by Victoria Watts and Robert W. Gehl

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Publication details: Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars, 2010Edition: 1rst edDescription: vi, 178 pISBN:

9781443816946

Summary: In our digital media saturated lives, where we spend increasing amounts of time in “virtual worlds” such as Second Life or online on blogs and video sites, it can be easy to forget about public spaces. Unlike content in virtual worlds, cultural programs in public spaces are events that are lived and experienced bodily and sensuously. Museum exhibits, public music performances, sports, art festivals – these events and spaces are truly immediate, which is to say that they are lived bodily by those that participate in and produce them. While media might be involved, these phenomena are wholly different from broadcast mass media objects. This book, The Politics of Cultural Programming in Public Spaces, interrogates these events and spaces in order to discover – and recover – the ways in which they affect subjectivity. We offer this not in lieu of interrogations of our heavily mediated world, but as a reminder that public spaces and public events still matter to millions of people worldwide. To this end, this collection groups together two seemingly different objects: events and institutions. Cultural events, such as festivals, protests, and concerts, are often considered one-time phenomena. Even events that are annual are seen as relegated to a brief period of time. Institutions, such as museums, are seen as more permanent, even timeless. Yet both are caught in complex political and economic webs, and both mutate through time as various constituencies struggle over their uses and meanings. Short-term events persist in cultural memory through news reports, eyewitness accounts, and documentaries. Museums and exhibits, for all their persistence, often undergo turnover in personnel and subsequently are sites of shifting political and cultural mores. Moreover, since this book deals with cultural programming in public spaces, all of the objects considered here are seen as intimately tied to heterogeneous geographical/political spaces. Seen in this light, the distinction between, say a book festival and a sculpture garden, is more arbitrary than helpful. In the final analysis, no object is free of the web of determinations, and the essays in the book explore the ramifications of this fact. (Font: Editor)

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Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Book	Centre d' Informació i Documentació del CERC Sala	General	S 00276	1	Available		1900140704

Introduction / Robert Gehl -- I. Imagining space in the city: 1. Public space and the fear of cities: the politics of cultural programming in Seattle's Westlake Park / Timothy A. Gibson ; 2. The dual spectacle of the West Kowloon Cultural District: de-centering public culture in Hong Kong, 2001-2006 / Fan Yang ; 3. Garden, city, world: Los Angeles' late Twentieth Century multicultural arts festivals / Marina Peterson ; 4. Popular digitization and participation in Nuit Blanche / Chiara Bernasconi -- II. Intellectuals and ideologies in Museums: 5. Provocation not instruction: interpretation and face-to-face pedagogy in heritage institutions / Susan L.T. Ashley ; 6. The cultural politics of Cold War: the International Spy Museum and the Post 9/11 US security state / Kimberly A. Williams ; 7. The Museum of Modern Arts as late christian ritual: a metaphysical hypothesis / Seth Feman -- III. Making space for art and politics: 8. Feminism, the public sphere and The Incest awareness project at the woman's building / Michelle Moravec ; 9. Making spaces into places: a conversation with Edgar Endress / Victoria Watts ; 10. Building tension: Montreal's Place des Arts / Katrina Enros -- Index

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