Curated Guides > Thematic Series > Understanding Museums
Understanding Museums
The powerful and privileged have hoarded precious artifacts in museums for centuries, and it's only recently that these treasures were made available to the rest of us. What purpose did museums serve? And why does every city have one today?
Duveen Room, The British Museum with the Parthenon frieze (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
- The case for museums
- A brief history of the art museum
- Museums and politics: the Louvre, Paris
- Art Museums and (Art) Objects
- Artists in and against the museum
- The changing social functions of art museums
- Looking at Art Museums
- How museums shape meaning
- An interview with Fred Wilson about the conventions of museums and race
- Repatriating artworks
- Seizure of Looted Antiquities Illuminates What Museums Want Hidden
- Local art appropriation in France—a study of the loot in the Louvre Museum
- Remake the Met
- Looting, collecting, and exhibiting: the Bubon bronzes
- From tomb to museum: Euphronios, Sarpedon Krater
- Nazi looting: Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally
- Paikea at the American Museum of Natural History
- The Looting of Cambodian Antiquities
- Who owns the Parthenon sculptures?
