Exhibition and awe

Regimes of Visibility in the Presentation of an Emperor

Bibliographic Data

ID2390959
AuthorsStephan Feuchtwang (London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume16
Issue1
Pages64-79
Publication date2011-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Material Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1359183510394942
OpenAlexW1969316385
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited13

As a publicly funded institution, the British Museum has a mission to draw in a public that might not otherwise visit a museum. For this purpose, it puts on exhibitions such as the series on emperors, for which a special exhibition space was created under the dome of the Reading Room. The first exhibition (followed by exhibitions on Hadrian, Shah Abbas and Moctezuma) was a show of 20 terracotta figures from the complex of the Chinese First Emperor's tomb, on display between September 2007 and April 2008. The result of years of planning and diplomatic negotiations, the exhibition proved to be a blockbuster success for the British Museum. This article is a revised version of the William Fagg Lecture delivered by the author in 2007. It addresses and compares the particular regimes of vision entailed in exhibition, rather than permanent museum display, and those that are assumed to have informed the creation of the First Emperor's tomb in the 3rd century BCE - the interaction between what can and what cannot be seen, ways of making the invisible apparent and of imagining it

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Emperor · Exhibition · Institution · Negotiation · Political science · Presentation (obstetrics · Reading (process · Social science · Sociology · Terracotta · Visual arts · Computer Science · Conservation Techniques and Studies · History · Law · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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