Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Museum of Babel: Meditations on the Metahistorical Turn in Museography

The Museum of Babel: Meditations on the Metahistorical Turn in Museography

Thurner, Mark

Paperback

Series: Routledge Research in Museum Studies

General ReferenceGeneral Art

ISBN10: 1032911530
ISBN13: 9781032911533
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Aug 27 2026
Pages: 202
Weight: 0.69
Height: 0.46 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

The Museum of Babel: Meditations on the Metahistorical Turn in Museography is a thought-provoking, transatlantic reading of contemporary exhibits of the museum's own past. Museums everywhere now exhibit 'evocations' of their own pasts, often in the form of refashioned, ancestral cabinets of curiosities. Moving beyond discussions of 'the return to curiosity, ' Thurner calls this retrospective trend the metahistorical turn in museography. Providing engaging and lively meditations on exhibits of the museal past in art, natural history, archaeology, and anthropology museums, including the Prado, the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, the Ashmolean, the British Museum, the Louvre, Coimbra's Science Museum, Brazil's scorched Museu Nacional, Mexico's Museum of Anthropology, Argentina's Museo de la Plata, and the Venice Art Biennale, Thurner argues that the ongoing metahistorical turn in museography is exposing the museum's true vocation, which is to be a museum of itself, or metamuseum.

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