"The Past for Sale? The Economic Entanglements of Cultural Heritage" 

--Call for Papers

The University of Massachusetts Amherst
Center for Heritage and Society
May 15-17, 2013

The economic valuation of cultural heritage - whether protected and
developed or illegally looted and exported - is among the most pressing
practical research questions in the fields of both Cultural Heritage
Studies and Community Development. What price in dollars or social value
does heritage have in the 21st century? How is heritage marketed and sold
in an era of rampant globalization and neoliberalism?

On the one hand, nations, regions, cities, and even small towns are
investing significant public funds in the development and public
presentation of archaeological sites, historic monuments, and historic
districts in the hope of economic revitalization through tourism or
increased property values. On the other, unprecedented diplomatic and legal
measures are being taken to repatriate looted cultural property and put an
end to the enormously profitable antiquities trade. What is happening on
the ground? What types of heritage are being marketed, returned, or sold,
and for what purposes? Who stands to gain from these processes?

The goal of this conference is to bring together a wide range of academics,
economists, heritage professionals, development experts, government
officials, and community leaders to examine the economic impacts of
cultural heritage and its implications for contemporary society. Yet rather
than seeing heritage-based tourism, urban redevelopment, and antiquities
looting as distinct economic instances involving monetary profits or
losses, we hope to encourage a trans-disciplinary discussion of the
overlapping economic entanglements of cultural heritage and the broader
social implications.

Themes to be explored in this conference will include:

- Tourism: How has the need to market cultural heritage shaped communities,
landscapes, and historic centers? Do common methods for drawing tourists
(seeking UNESCO World Heritage status, creating destinations, building new
museums, etc.) actually increase tourism? What kinds of social or economic
costs does tourism give rise to, and who or what bears the burden of these
costs?

- Urban Revitalization: How does the promise of heritage tourism revenues
lead to new ways of marketing or packaging the city? What types of
(mega)projects does heritage tourism give rise to? Does it lead to
'economic revitalization'? Who ultimately profits? And what impacts does it
have on the fabric of the city?

- Archaeological Looting, the Antiquities Market, and its Costs: What does
looting tell us about the needs of the communities who live on and near
archaeological sites? What is the larger socio-economic context of looting
in the global antiquities market? Who benefits from the movement of
archaeological material from field to lab to museum?

The conference will bring together a wide variety of scholars to examine
the economic dimensions of cultural heritage and its implications for
contemporary society.

Invited speakers include:

- Gregory Ashworth, Emeritus Professor of Heritage Management and Urban
Tourism at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences of the University of Groningen,
and Visiting Professor at University of Brighton (UK) Tourism and Research
Group and NHTV Breda (Netherlands)
- J.P. Singh, Professor of Global Affairs and Cultural Studies at George
Mason University
- Françoise Benhamou, Professor of Economics at Sciences Po-Paris,
President of the Association for Cultural Economics International (ACEI),
and Commissioner of the ARCEP
- Neil Brodie, Senior Research Fellow, Scottish Centre for Crime and
Justice Research, University of Glasgow

To learn more about the conference or to submit an abstract, please visit
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/hightechheritage/callforpapers.html . The
deadline for abstracts is Jan. 15, 2013.

Please direct questions to Grace Cleary ( gcleary@anthro.umass.edu ) at the
Center for Heritage and Society.

Thinking about what courses to take next semester?

Come meet students from the

Material Culture Program

and learn about what we do!

free pizza + information session

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Birge 348

Stop by any time between 4:30 and 6:30

Find out more about:

*Program requirements

*How the certificate can boost your CV

*Spring electives

There have been lots of Material Culture happenings recently; here is just a glimpse!

Joel Huntley

Guest Speaker for Art History 363: American Decorative Arts and Interiors: 1620-1840

September 21, 2012/special topic: ceramics

Anna Andrzejewski

Guest Speaker for Art History 464: Dimensions of Material Culture

September 27, 2012/special topic: cities

 

Guest Speaker for Art History 363: American Decorative Arts and Interiors: 1620-1840

September 28, 2012/special topic: wood

Marc Vallon

Baroque Bassoon Professor in Music School

Lecture and demonstration of musical properties

with the baroque instrument – changes from

early to modern times.

October 5, 2012

Greenhill Lecture: Humor in Cold Dead Type - Save the Date

Humor in Cold Dead Type: Performing Artemus Ward’s London Panorama Lecture in Print
a lecture by
Jennifer A. Greenhill, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 
Thursday, November 8, 2012 at 6 p.m. in Elvehjem Building, Room L140

Save the date as well for an afternoon graduate student workshop with Professor Greenhill on race, abstraction, and illustration.

Greenhill’s recently completed book Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (University of California Press, 2012) investigates the strategies artists devised to simultaneously conform to and humorously undermine "serious" artistic culture during the late nineteenth century, when calls for a new cultural sophistication ran headlong into a growing public appetite for humor.

This talk explores the materiality of print and awkwardness of typographic humor through a study of Artemus Ward’s Lecture (As Delivered at the Egyptian Hall, London), an experimental volume published in 1869.  The book attempts to preserve the hilarity of a recently deceased American humorist, Charles Farrar Browne, known as “Artemus Ward,” the character who made President Lincoln laugh during the Civil War and inspired Mark Twain as he developed his own comic techniques. It does so with explanatory glosses on the lecture’s content, thirty-six woodcut illustrations depicting the various scenes of Ward’s visual aid, an execrably painted panorama, and experimental typography meant to evoke the humorist’s delivery of his material.

Excessive in its contrivances, Ward’s book demonstrates the inevitable awkwardness of intermedial translation projects, perhaps especially those focused on preserving the subtleties of comic performance and the interactivity of the theatrical encounter. But the book’s awkwardness is symptomatic of its overriding logic and therefore signifies more than simply a failed effort to translate the stage to the page.  It signifies, Greenhill argues, the degree to which Ward’s editors had internalized his entertainment and his reputation more generally, as a humorist given to excess and lecturing on a subject—Mormonism—that had its own reputation for immoderation. The book offers a powerful example of mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of “muchness,” as Ward would say, but it does more than this: it suggests the ways that typographic expression might not only index surface features of a performance, but also reveal the deep structure of the event and the social framework in which it found form.

Sponsored by the UW-Madison Material Culture Program, University Lectures Committee, Department of Art History, and the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture

Material Culture Courses - Fall 2012

Afro-American Studies 674: Seminar: Beyond Primitivism: African and African-American Art in Museums - Frieda Tesfagiorgis

Art History 300: The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece - William Aylward

Art History 364: History of American Art, 1607-Present - Lauren Kroiz

Art History 464: Dimensions of Material Culture - Ellery Foutch and Lauren Kroiz

Art History 865: Seminar: Material Culture of the Enlightenment: Art, Technology and Design - Ann Smart Martin

Classics 700: Seminar: The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece - William Aylward

Design Studies 421: History of European Interiors: Ancient through 18th Century - Monica Penick

Design Studies 430: History of Textiles - Courtney Henson

Design Studies 639: Seminar: Culture and the Built Environment - Jung-Hye Shin

Design Studies 642: Seminar: Taste - Preeti Chopra

Design Studies 920: Seminar: American Design in the Atomic Age: 1940-1965 - Monica Penick

Geography 305: Introduction to the City - Sarah Moore

Geography 560: American Environmental History - William Cronon

Landscape Architecture 375: Cultural Landscapes of Food - special topics course - Janet Gilmore

Seminar: American Design in the Atomic Age

Instructor: Dr. Monica Penick

Email: mpenick@wisc.edu

Prerequisites

The course is open to graduate students in Design Studies, Art History, History, and related fields. Completion of the design history survey sequence is recommended.

Course Description

This graduate seminar investigates the relationship between American design and culture in the two decades following World War II.  Advancing technologies, expanding economies, shifting social paradigms, and the cultural-political struggle between emerging world superpowers impacted the designed environment in a multiplicity of ways, at both the “high” and “low” levels. As modernism (broadly interpreted) became the dominant language of design (in architecture, interiors, furnishings, and decorative arts), it was simultaneously tasked with representing American capitalism, democracy, and the quest for cultural supremacy. The fear of communist domination – under the looming shadow of the atomic bomb – added yet another layer of complexity to the postwar world view, and provided a new set of challenges to which designers were compelled to respond.

We will begin the course by establishing the historical and cultural context, the “mood,” of the postwar decades. Students will absorb the moment as those who lived during the time period; we will use film, television, literature, popular magazines (for acquaintance with both print images and graphic design), advertisements, fashion, and music to develop a “period eye.” We will then examine a range of commercial, residential, institutional and leisure-themed architecture and interiors in concert with furnishings, decorative arts, and objects of popular culture. Though this, we will investigate the ways in which designers responded to a changing society and evolving tastes, and how these practitioners struggled to represent complex concepts (and ideologies) in built form. The aim of this course is to provide students with a broad context that will enable them to understand the ways in which the Atomic Age and the Cold War affected the designed environment.

Seminar: Topics on African-American Artists: African and African American Art in Museums

This course fulfill Humanities, Ethnic Studies, Afro-American Studies, Art, and related African Studies requirements.

It meets Tuesday: 5:15-7:45.

Students will not only engage exciting readings, they will interact with Chazen Museum staff and develop an understanding of how museums function, as well as an understanding of relationships between art history, museums, and education.

Though an important aim of this course is to introduce students to African and African American art in museums (especially at the Chazen Museum), it will consider art by diverse populations (including questions of gender, sexuality, and disability) with the larger aim of introducing museum best practices, collecting, diversity, museum education, museum-schools relationship, debates on cultural property and restitution, and problems related aesthetics vs. ethnographic displays. In this process, students will develop skills in art historical analysis. Assignments will include short papers, and a major paper or project.

For authorization, please email Freida High at high@wisc.edu <high@wisc.edu>.