Museum Metaphors

A Nottingham Institute for Research in Visual Culture and Centre for Advanced Studies symposium

Throughout the relatively short history of the art museum, metaphorical constructs have often been used to elucidate the museum’s social and cultural role, as well as to define its various protagonists. Through the metaphorical language of the museum as, for example, temple (Duncan), tomb (Adorno), laboratory (Barr), or supermarket (Warhol), artists, curators, critics, philosophers and historians have sought to read the institution of the museum as symbolic of particular cultural and social ideologies.

Against the backdrop of a growing current interest in institutional and exhibition histories, this symposium will consider the many metaphors that have been used to describe, define and theorise museums, as well as the ways in which changes in the metaphorical language of the museum might indicate broader discursive shifts. In addition, it will ask what metaphorical constructs shape our conception of museums today.

Keynote speakers:

• Dr Lucy Bradnock, University of Nottingham
• Dr Suzanne MacLeod, University of Leicester
• Dr Michaela Giebelhausen, University of Essex
• Dr Dimitra Christidou, Institute of Archaeology, UCL ‘Performing etiquette in the art museum’
• Briley Rasmussen, University of Leicester
• Eleanor Roberts, Queen Mary, University of London ‘Apollinaire as Patron Saint: spectacles of catholicity at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts’
• Dr Harpreet (Neena) Mand, School of Architecture & Built Environment, University of Newcastle, Australia ‘Making the postcolonial Indian Modern: Mandala as metaphor in the Museums of Correa’ 
• Hilary Floe, University of Oxford The ‘Constructed Garden’: Art, Play and Utopia at the 1960s Museum of Modern Art, Oxford’
• Dr Teresita Scalco, Università Iuav di Venezia ‘Museum of Innocence (Istanbul): Reflections on the concepts of “objects” and “museums”’