Special Topics in Museum and Gallery Management: Museum Administration

This course considers how museums reveal the social and cultural ideologies of those who build, pay for, work in, and visit them. We will study the ways in which history is (and has been) constructed by museum administration, acquisitions, exhibitions, and installations. We will also consider the ways in which museums are constructed by looking at the world-wide boom in museum architecture, examining curatorial practice and exhibition strategies and projects of national patrimony and public betterment, which have become just small parts of a global entertainment and tourist industry.