Critical Practice Artists, museums, ethics

Critical Practice is an ambitious work that blurs the boundaries between art history, museum studies, political science and applied ethics. Marstine demonstrates how convergences between institutional critique and socially engaged practice, as represented by the term ‘critical practice’, can create conditions for organisational change, particularly facilitating increased public agency and shared authority. The book analyses a range of museum interventions exploring such subjects as the ethical stewardship of collections, hybridity as a methodological approach to social justice and alternative forms of democracy. Discussing critical practice within the framework of peace and reconciliation studies, Marstine shows how artists’ interventions can redress exclusions, inequalities and relational frictions between museums and their publics. Elucidating the museological and ethical implications of institutional critique and socially engaged practice, Marstine has provided a timely and thoughtful resource for museum studies scholars, artists, museum professionals, art historians and graduate students worldwide who are interested in mapping and unpacking the intricate relationships among artists, museums and communities.

1 Critical Practice as Reconciliation 2 Changing Hands: Ethical Stewardship of Collections 3‘Temple Swapping’: Hybridity and Social Justice 4Platforms: Negotiating and Renegotiating the Terms of Democracy 5Reconciliation and the Discursive Museum

Janet Marstine is Academic Director of the School of Museums Studies at the University of Leicester. She is the co-editor of New Directions in Museum Ethics (2012), and editor of The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics (2011) and New Museum Theory and Practice: An introduction (2005).