Museums

A museum (/mjuˈziːəm/; myoo-zee-um) is an institution that cares for (conserves) a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance and some public museums makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities throughout the world and more local ones exist in smaller cities, towns and even the countryside. Museums have varying aims, ranging from serving researchers and specialists to serving the general public. The goal of serving researchers is increasingl ...more

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall
The Metropolitan Affair (On Central Park, #1)
How Dinosaurs Went Extinct: A Safety Guide
Friends of the Museum
Letters to Camondo
One Woman Show
The Glass Pyramid: A Story of the Louvre Museum and Architect I.M. Pei
Decolonize Museums (Decolonize That!)
The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution
The Museum of Forgotten Memories
The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World's Most Famous Museum
Doodleville #2: Art Attacks!: (A Graphic Novel)
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums
Information Desk: An Epic
Wonderstruck
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
The Participatory Museum
Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum
All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology
The Art of Relevance
The Cloisters
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums
Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums (American Association for State and Local History)
Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display
Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (First Peoples, New Directions in Indigenous Studies)
Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Leadership and Self-Deception by The Arbinger InstituteArt Scenes by Pablo HelgueraPermission Marketing by Seth Godin33 Artists in 3 Acts by Sarah ThorntonManual of Contemporary Art Style by Pablo Helguera
ARAD Columbia
22 books — 3 voters
Pompeii  by Alex; Laurence ButterworthFrom Caligula to Constantine by Eric R. VarnerEvil Roman Emperors by Phillip BarlagA Rome of One's Own by Emma SouthonThe Romanization of Britain by Martin Millett
Roman non-fiction
13 books — 5 voters

Linnea in Monet's Garden by Christina BjörkThe Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau by Michelle MarkelThe Museum by Susan VerdeYou Can't Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum by Jacqueline Preiss WeitzmanYou Can't Take a Balloon into the National Gallery by Jacqueline Preiss Weitzman
Picture Books About Museums
74 books — 26 voters


John Cotton Dana
Art should be studied, not worshipped. Artworks should be preserved that they may help us, not that they may amaze and confound us. Above all, we should study them with the purpose of learning from them.
John Cotton Dana

Museum architectural search committees have invariably included the Kimbell in their international scouting tours of exemplary art galleries (a practice pioneered by Velma Kimbell, the founder’s widow, in 1964). Those groups no doubt respond to the Kimbell with suitable reverence, but given the buildings they later commissioned, many post-Bilbao museum patrons obviously wanted something quite different. The disparity between Kahn’s museums and recent examples of that genre parallels the discrepa ...more
Martin Filler, Makers of Modern Architecture: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry (New York Review Books

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