Affiliation:
1. The University of Melbourne
Abstract
The museum enterprise in China has long been seen as a state monopoly.
This chapter finds that the contingent roles of the state and the market, the
agencies of social and cultural actors in their signifying practices, as well as
the notion of museum public, have been neglected in the existing analyses
of museums in China. By drawing the constructive, multidimensional
model, ‘museum circuit’, it argues that the study of China’s museums
should incorporate reflection upon institutional-regulatory changes,
processes of cultural production by networks of museum intermediaries,
and processes of museum consumption as practices of appropriation,
negotiation, or resistance. Based on the model, it suggests an empirical
study of the art museal processes that have affected GPRD since the 1990s.
Publisher
Amsterdam University Press