front cover of A Contemporary Archaeology of London's Mega Events
A Contemporary Archaeology of London's Mega Events
From the Great Exhibition to London 2012
Jonathan Gardner
University College London, 2022
The contemporary archaeology of urban mega-events.

This book explores the traces of London’s most significant modern “mega events”: the Great Exhibition of 1851, the 1951 Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition, and the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Though only open for a few weeks or months, mega events permanently and disruptively reshape their host cities and societies: they demolish and rebuild whole districts, they draw in materials and participants from around the globe, and their organizers self-consciously seek to leave a “legacy” that will endure for decades or more. The book argues that these spectacles must thus be seen as long-lived and persistent, rather than simply transient or short-term phenomena. It explores the long-term history of each event through contemporary archaeology, examining the contents and building materials of the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace and their extraordinary afterlife at Sydenham, South London; how the Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition employed displays of ancient history to construct a new postwar British identity; and how London 2012 dealt with competing visions of the past as archaeology, waste, and heritage in creating a vision of the future.
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front cover of What Makes a Great Exhibition?
What Makes a Great Exhibition?
Edited by Paula Marincola
Reaktion Books, 2007

For better or worse, museums are changing from forbidding bastions of rare art into audience-friendly institutions that often specialize in “blockbuster” exhibitions designed to draw crowds. But in the midst of this sea change, one largely unanswered question stands out: “What makes a great exhibition?” Some of the world’s leading curators and art historians try to answer this question here, as they examine the elements of a museum exhibition from every angle.

What Makes a Great Exhibition? investigates the challenges facing American and European contemporary art in particular, exploring such issues as group exhibitions, video and craft, and the ways that architecture influences the nature of the exhibitions under its roof. The distinguished contributors address diverse topics, including Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma Golden’s examination of ethnically-focused exhibitions; and Robert Storr, director of the 2007 Venice Biennale and formerly of the Museum of Modern Art, on the meaning of “exhibition and “exhibitionmaker.”

A thought-provoking volume on the practice of curatorial work and the mission of modern museums, What Makes A Great Exhibition? will be indispensable reading for all art professionals and scholars working today.

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