Inside the Lost Museum

By Steven Lubar,

Book cover of Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present

Book description

Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our senses and orchestrate our impressions, balancing presentation and preservation, informationā€¦

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Why read it?

1 author picked Inside the Lost Museum as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I like this bookā€™s discussion of curators as one of two ā€œsources of truth.ā€

It mentions ā€œcuratorial knowledgeā€ and ā€œprovenance research,ā€ but also mentions ā€œdonors and people associated with the collection.ā€

With such subjects, there exists a huge area for administrative abuse: for example, those who engage curators/scholars to do provenance research and then dismiss it if not what the museum expected or intended.

Yet this book states, and I agree: ā€œCataloguing takes deep expertise and time.ā€ So this book brings up some of the pitfalls curators can experience.

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Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctorā€”and only womanā€”on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route upā€¦

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