Claire Bishop: Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (2013)

“The future of the public museum, able to represent the interests of the ninety-nine percent rather than to consolidate private privilege, has never seemed bleaker. Or has it?

In the face of austerity cuts to public funding, a handful of museums of contemporary art have devised compelling alternatives to the mantra of bigger is better and richer. Radical Museology presents the collection displays of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional de Reina Sofía in Madrid and MSUM in Ljubljana as outlines of a new understanding of the contemporary in contemporary art.

Radical Museology is a vivid manifesto for the contemporary as a method rather than a periodization, and for the importance of a politicized representation of history in museums of contemporary art.” (from the back cover)

With drawings by Dan Perjovschi
Publisher Koenig Books, London, 2013
ISBN 3863353641, 9783863353643
79 pages
via Claire Bishop

Reviews: Sanne Kofod Olsen (Kunstkritikk, 2014), Axel Gryspeerdt (Questions de communication, 2021, FR).

WorldCat

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