Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Still Life : Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum, Paperback / softback Book

Still Life : Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading?

How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing?

How do you render a fading photograph eternal--or should you attempt it at all?

These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis.

In Still Life, Fernando Dominguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museums workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters. Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening.

Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Dominguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus--from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machines rooms--and teams of workers--from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers--who fight to hold artworks still. As the MoMA reopens after massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.

Information

Other Formats

£31.00

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information