Curating Pop

Exhibiting Popular Music in the Museum

Sarah Baker, Lauren Istvandity, Raphaël Nowak

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501343599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Curating Pop speaks to the rapidly growing interest in the study of popular music exhibitions, which has occurred alongside the increasing number of popular music museums in operation across the world. Focusing on curatorial practices and processes, this book draws on interviews with museum workers and curators from twenty museums globally, including the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, the Experience Music Project in Seattle and the PopMuseum in Prague. Through a consideration of the subjective experiences of curators involved in the exhibition of popular music in museums in a range of geographic locations, Curating Pop compares institutional practices internationally, illustrating the ways in which popular music history is presented to visitors in a wider sense.

1

Curatorial Practice in Popular Music Museums: An Introduction

The first exhibition I ever curated, in 1984 I think it was, or 1985, was actually a popular music exhibition. It was called Beat … people almost couldn’t understand why on earth an Arts Centre would want to do it. Why would you want to display all this old stuff? Why would you want to tell that story? Why would you want to value that story? It’s been very encouraging to see that change actually and to see many museums and galleries all around the world exploring popular music. … I think a lot of cultural institutions look at popular music [now] because it is actually the art form of the twentieth century in a way. To see that coming to established institutions, that’s been an enormous change and a big shift.

(Respondent 14, Arts Centre Melbourne)

Since the end of the Second World War, popular music has developed as an important form of leisure. Its increasing stylistic and aesthetic diversification has been symbolized by a range of instruments, material objects and musicians, some of whom have been elevated to the rank of celebrity. Music is now described as having a ‘ubiquitous’ presence (see Kassabian 2013) in Western contemporary societies. However, the very status of popular music has been at the core of many vernacular, journalistic and academic discussions and debates. Simon Frith (1991) suggests, for instance, that popular music typically elicits three different types of attitudes: between a constant critique and rejection, an indifference and a permanent celebration. Popular music has undergone a process of legitimation (see Baumann 2007), whereby its status has been elevated over time. In this book, we are interested in exploring how popular music, the heritage of which is now deemed worthy of preservation, is integrated within museums.

The example that opens this chapter is an extract from one of our research interviews. Here, Respondent 14 points to the extent to which the inclusion of popular music’s material past within a museum was once considered controversial. Popular music is often not deemed ‘legitimate’, or worthy enough, to be featured in a heritage institution, where it is seen by some as an ephemeral, throw-away or meaningless product of the cultural industries that does not deserve safeguarding within the museum. Despite this, there has been a recent move towards the celebration and preservation of popular music in vernacular and professional spheres. The question of its status, or of its appreciation by certain authors (journalists, academics and others), is superseded by the acknowledgement that popular music has a cultural significance that makes it worth remembering and preserving (see Bennett 2009; Kong 1999). Not only have popular music heritage initiatives and practices flourished over the last few decades but the very idea of preserving the heritage of popular music has become somewhat of an ‘obsession’ (Le Guern 2015).

Over the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in published scholarship on the subject of popular music heritage, as evidenced by edited books and journal special issues on the topic (e.g. Baker [ed.] 2015; Baker et al. [eds] 2018; Bennett and Janssen [eds] 2017; Cohen et al. [eds] 2015; Leonard and Knifton [eds] 2015a). Popular music is largely defined in these works as a post-1945 ‘form of music that is based on commercial aesthetics, produced within the framework of a music industry and primarily mass distributed’ (Brandellero and Janssen 2014: 225), but popular music can also be understood as extending further back in time than a presentist model allows (see Johnson 2018). Whether popular music is thought to have its emergence in the mid-twentieth century or much earlier, the academic interest in popular music as heritage has emerged, as Philippe Le Guern argues (2015: 157–9), firstly, from a generational ‘urge to look back on one’s own past’; secondly, from transformations in digital technologies which have subsequently ‘increas[ed] the importance and value of vernacular objects and deeply modifi[ed] our relationship to cultural memory’; and finally, as an ‘antidote … to the malaise caused by the increasing acceleration of social change’. The heritagization of popular music in its various forms and genres can be witnessed in the collection, preservation, representation and canonization of popular music histories in, for example, documentaries (Long and Wall 2013), archives (Baker, Doyle and Homan 2016) and critical lists such as Rolling Stone magazine’s ‘500 Greatest Albums’ (Schmutz 2005).

It is only recently that this ‘looking back’ on popular music’s past has been recognized as a legitimate field of heritage practice. Popular music as heritage is ‘socially produced through the practices of a range of actors’ who deploy ‘a variety of legitimising discourses … ranging from personal and collective attachment and memory to commercial endeavours rebranding and canonising’ popular music’s past (Brandellero and Janssen 2014: 220). As Andy Bennett (2009: 478) observes, the kind of shift being acknowledged by Respondent 14 in our opening extract can be partly attributed to the presence of baby boomers working within the cultural industries and heritage sectors who draw on ‘their institutional power and status’ to confer ‘critical acclaim, historical importance and cultural value’ to popular music. As a result, there is a broad acceptance within the heritage sector of cultural forms and associated artefacts that still exist within the living memory of the producers and consumers of this heritage (Long 2018). However, Bennett (2015: 23–5) also reminds us that the principal actors behind this broad acceptance bring to the ‘heritagization’ of popular music ‘the hegemonic grip of white, Anglo-American, middle class values’, producing a ‘highly selective canon of popular music heritage’ which ‘threatens to expunge a range of other ways in which popular music is remembered and celebrated, particularly in local and peripheral contexts’.

One focus within the emergent body of literature on popular music heritage is the exhibition and curation of popular music in museums. Museums have been central to the institutionalization of popular music as heritage, offering interpretations of popular music’s history by way of ‘temporary exhibitions, permanent displays and dedicated visitor experiences’ that have ‘actively mobilised sounds, images and objects’ to capture the diversity of popular music’s material past (Leonard 2014: 357). Museum displays ‘make explicit’ (Hoelscher 2011: 204) popular music’s transformation into heritage and ‘help to validate the merits of the “heritigisation” of popular music’ (Leonard 2014: 358). Our core interest in undertaking this research was to speak to the people responsible for such displays: the curators. Museum curators are cultural agents, in that they ‘participate in a production of cultural value’ (O’Neill 2007: 15), and take on a great responsibility in communicating popular music’s past. The literature on curatorial practice refers predominantly to the responsibilities of housing and presenting materials in line with best practice guidelines, but lacks a formulation of such guidelines into any sort of typology of common strategies and concepts developed for the creation of exhibitions.

The growing interest in the study of popular music exhibitions has occurred in parallel with the increasing number of popular music museums in operation across the world, such as those discussed in this book. The investment in establishing museums of popular music culture shows no sign of waning, with many others in development at the time of writing (e.g. Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Electronic Music, the Estonian Music Hall of Fame, the Indian Music Experience). This trend is perhaps not surprising, considering it is now over sixty years since the declared ‘birth’ of ‘rock’ (Peterson 1990) and given these are institutions that emphasize and celebrate ‘shared generational experience and cultural memory’ (Bennett 2009: 476). For example, one of our respondents for this study was on a mission:

To get up as many [music museums] as I can while I’m still able to do it, believing that the more we have the better it is, because more of our history and culture will be preserved, more education programmes will come out of it, and there’s strength in numbers. (Respondent 10)

The embrace of popular music heritage is now well established in both scholarship and museum practice.

Much of the scholarship on popular music museums has emerged from the field of popular music studies. The most prolific scholar to have contributed to a greater understanding of the place of popular music in exhibitions and museums is Marion Leonard (e.g. 2007, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2018; Leonard and Knifton 2015a,b,c), whose work has become a touchstone for studies of popular music display and visitor engagement. Scholarship on popular music museums, including the work of Leonard, also engages with literature from museum studies and, increasingly, has found a home in heritage and museum-focused journals, including International Journal of Heritage Studies (Baker, Istvandity and Nowak 2016a; Fairchild 2018; Leonard 2014; Mortensen and Madsen 2015), Museum & Society (Fairchild 2017), Museum Management and Curatorship (Baker, Istvandity and Nowak 2016b) and Curator: The Museum Journal (Cortez 2016). This work broadly acknowledges, usually implicitly, the ‘new museology’ as offering a contextual frame for considering popular music museums. Vikki McCall and Clive Gray (2014: 20) note that the ‘new museology’, also referred to as new museum theory, ‘is a discourse around the social and political roles of museums’ which indicates a ‘shift in focus and intention within the museums world, away from the functional idea of museums’. Rather than an emphasis on ‘classic, collections-centred museum models’, new museology focuses on ‘new communication and new styles of expression’ and reconsiders ‘the position of museums in conservation, the epistemological status of artefacts on display, and the nature and purpose of museum scholarship’ (McCall and Gray 2014: 20).

The concept of the new museum presents a significant shift away from the traditional mode of museum design and curatorship, which was underpinned by object-based displays, a focus on material authenticity in curation and an emphasis on the museum as a place of scholarly devotion rather than a leisure activity (Doering 1999). Instead, the new museum attempts to flip the traditional ‘top-down’ approach to curation, transforming both the presentation and appeal of these institutions as well as changing the ways in which museum content is perceived by visitors. Also termed the ‘post-museum’, Janet Marstine (2006: 19) suggests that such places ‘seek to share power with the communities [they] serve’, recognizing the co-construction of knowledge between museums and visitors. McCall and Gray (2014: 21) describe this ‘visitor-oriented ethos’ as being supported by a ‘shift in the identity of museum professionals from “legislator” to “interpreter”’. Hence, new museums seek to be more relevant, exciting and accessible to the general public through an emphasis on forms of ‘experiential learning’ that draw visitors into the interpretive process by way of discourses of memory and narrative (Andermann and Arnold-de Simine 2012). It is perhaps not surprising that new museology intersects with work on the popular music museum given, as Rhiannon Mason (2011: 23) observes, new museology is a ‘branch of museum studies concerned with those ideas central to cultural theory’.

Reference to the new museology is particularly evident in Kathryn Johnson’s (2015) discussion of the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), for which she was an assistant curator. Johnson (2015: 6) highlights how the new museology marked a shift in undertaking and understanding curatorial practice and exhibition design, emphasizing a ‘questioning a pproach to curatorial authority’ and ‘increased recognition of the curator’s accountability’. Johnson (2015: 6) also makes explicit the link between the new museology and popular music exhibitions, arguing that these exhibitions ‘invite and require a curatorial approach and language that is in sympathy with this [new museological] trend towards inclusive and multivalent exhibition environments’. Engagement with the new museology can also be observed in the work of, for example, Charles Fairchild (2017, 2018) and Chris Bruce (2006), who adopt the notion of the ‘new museum’ as a frame through which to view the development of popular music museums, the exhibition of popular music and audience engagement. It is interesting to note that the increase in popular music museums has occurred alongside development and application of new museology theories.

The focus on experiential learning in the new museum is particularly evident in the large number of popular music museums, such as the Museum of Pop Culture (formerly known as Experience Music Project) in the United States, which have embraced the use of multimedia displays, technological immersion and high-level interactional exhibits and have placed a strong emphasis on narrative in designing displays (Bruce 2006). Such an approach draws on the assumption, on the part of curators, that visitors are ‘amateur experts’ (Baym and Burnett 2009) who, particularly in the case of popular music museums, arrive at an exhibition ‘with a passionate and informed understanding of the subject’ (Pirrie Adams 2015: 114). Curators can expect visitors to be acquainted with the topics of exhibitions and to have developed their own viewpoints on them. On that note, Kathleen Pirrie Adams (2015: 115) observes that the ‘specific challenge for the popular music museum is how to effectively create a dialogue with its audience’s existent knowledge and attachments’. As new museums, then, popular music museums tend to emphasize a participatory experience, with an agenda that seeks to entertain as much as to educate, and in which display equates to spectacle (Bruce 2006). Fairchild’s (2018) work suggests the concep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Curatorial Practice in Popular Music Museums: An Introduction
• 2 Canonic Representations: The Celebration of Dominant (and Hidden) Histories
• 3 Selling the Museum Experience: Curation, Economies and Visitor Experience
• 4 Popular Music and Place: Local, National and Global Stories
• 5 Treating Objects like Art: Curating Material Culture
• 6 Telling Stories: Narratives of Popular Music’s Past
• 7 Curator Subjectivity: Influence and Bias in Popular Music Exhibitions
• 8 Living History: Nostalgia as Affective Curatorial Practice
• 9 Managing the Music: Sound in the Popular Music Museum
• 10 Beyond the Typology: Concluding Thoughts
• References
• Index
• Copyright