The Poetics and Geopolitics of Communication and Non-profit vs. Marketing in Museums

Yun Shun Susie Chung

doi:10.21638/11701/spbu27.2018.201

Authors

Yun Shun Susie Chung Southern New Hampshire University, 33, South Commercial Street, Manchester, New Hampshire, 03101, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21638/11701/spbu27.2018.201

Abstract

The various practices and the theoretical implications of the poetics and geopolitics in museums communicating collections represented by different disciplines are explored. Museological literature has already noted the associations of the structure and contexts that objects have lives through different ownership. In this paper, synchronously applying Jean Baudrillard’s concepts, the theoretical analysis of museum communication’s contemporary practices of exhibiting and marketing is conducted. Behind-the-scenes preservation is now displayed as a laboratory exhibition with the conservators as actors and the audience as part and parcel of the function of communication in art museums and natural history museums. Though the practice of integrating art, sound, and technology has been demonstrated in art and anthropology museums, the poetics of display applied in traditional natural history museums are discussed. The contextual identity of musealized objects in theory from conception, creation, provenance, to musealization is interpreted as first-person in a case-study exhibition. Studies show that visitors feel more attracted to objects that they can interconnect with, and using first-person interpretation techniques to communicate the series of contexts helps to produce the attracting power. The twenty-first-century free-range interpretation by visitors through the participatory action of labelling, now empowering museums to voice their arguments about geopolitics and race, is introduced. The function of museum marketing is examined to affirm that the non-profit management museum is a geopolitical supplier of poetical discourse. Museum communication operates through exhibitions and marketing in the making of poetical and geopolitical discourse that is enlightened by Baudrillardian concepts of the poetics of interior space.

Keywords:

Baudrillardian concepts, free-range interpretation, geopolitics, museum communication

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