Branding public memory in the Walmart Museum

Bibliographic Data

ID6442216
AuthorsJ E Hatfield (0000-0002-3429-4743, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume18
Issue4
Pages916-931
Publication date2024-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMemory Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1750-6980 • E-ISSN: 1750-6999
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/17506980241255075
OpenAlexW4399274909
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited35

Across the globe, visitors tour corporate museums. Corporate museums commemorate the history of a private company, often using standard methods of artifact curation and display. On the surface, these institutions appear like any other place of public memory. However, I argue that corporate museums pose a challenge to scholars who have conceptualized public memory as a domain of activity closely associated with the democratic ideal of the public sphere. Rather than promoting civic engagement or critical dialogue, corporate museums reduce public memory into a set of aesthetic resources that may be commodified, privatized, and thus transformed to benefit a social and economic system suffused by neoliberal capitalist values. To make this case, I perform a close reading of the Walmart Museum, showing how the institution memorializes the company’s founder as a technique for reinforcing established brand messaging and installing emergent modes of consumer citizenship under the guise of heritage tourism

Advertising · Aesthetics · Art · Business · Media studies · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · Visual arts · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Photography and Visual Culture

Tools

Open DOI