Blockchain Papers

Tadeus Mucelli

Este breve estudio de situación demuestra cómo Brasil ha intentado en las últimas dos décadas actuar en el área de la cultura digital mediante la implantación de infraestructuras y la formación de agentes e instituciones. Sin embargo, la asimetría educativa, financiera y cultural del país y la singularidad de la producción de la cultura y la formación del patrimonio en una sociedad posdigital implican complejidades que requieren nuevas actualizaciones de las prácticas, regímenes, habilidades y políticas de información, junto con la comprensión y el dominio de las tecnologías emergentes como web3, blockchain, “tokenización”, OADs e IA. El estudio pretende presentar este escenario y sus retos en el contexto de los acervos y colecciones, basadas en modelos tradicionales y nuevas colecciones artístico-científicas mediadas por estas tecnologías. Palabras clave: Cultura digital; acervos; colecciones; Blockchain; IA; Brasil. Technologies and digital culture in the redefinition of digital collections and heritage: a look to the future in the context of Brazil and its challenges Abstract: This brief survey demonstrates how Brazil has tried over the last two decades to act in the area of digital culture through the implementation of infrastructures and the training of agents and institutions. However, the educational, financial and cultural asymmetry of the country and the uniqueness of culture production and heritage formation in a post-digital society imply complexities that require new updates of information practices, regimes, skills and policies, along with the understanding and mastery of emerging technologies such as web3, blockchain, tokenisation, OADs and AI. The study aims to present this scenario and its challenges in the context of collections and collections based on traditional models and new art-science collections mediated by these technologies. Keywords: Digital culture; collections; collections; Blockchain; AI; Brazil. Artículo recibido: 18/10/2023. Revisado: 22/10/2023. Aceptado: 03/11/2023

Frances Liddell

The following paper reflects on how web3 contributes to audience engagement practices through the lens of 'access', 'interaction', 'collaboration', 'participation'.

Xiaowen Shi

In 2021, emerging concepts such as metaverse and Non-Fungible Token, which are supported by blockchain technology, became the hot words of the year in <italic>Collins Dictionary</italic>. They not only enrich the development mode of the digital economy, but also inject a blood of energy into the innovative development of China's cultural and creative industry. While it has potential value, it also has some hidden dangers. With the continuous encouragement of innovation, the boundary of innovation is rarely put forward. Therefore, it is of certain practical significance to discuss the innovation boundary of cultural and creative cultural relics digital collections in museums.

Shaun Wilson

Introduction The proliferation of non-fungible tokens has transformed cryptocurrency artefacts into a legitimised art form now considered in mainstream art collecting as an emerging high-yield commodity based on scarcity. As photography was debated “of being art” in the late 19th century, video art in the 1960s, virtual reality in the 1990s, and augmented reality in the 2010s, NFT art is the next medium of artwork tied to emergent cultural forms. From the concept of “introducing scarcity from born-digital assets for the first time ever, NFTs or crypto or digital collectibles, as they are also referred to, have already shown glimpses of their potential'” (Valeonti et al. 1). Yet for NFT art, “numerous misconceptions still exist that are partly caused by the complexity of the technology and partly by the existence of many blockchain variants” (Treiblmaier 2). As the discussion of NFT art is still centred on questions of justifying the legitimacy of the medium and its financial trading, critical analysis outside of these key points is still limited to blogs and online articles as the mainstay of debate. To distance NFTs from a common assumption that they are in some form or another a populous digital fad, cryptocurrencies are intended primarily as currencies, even if they maintain some asset-like properties (Baur et al.). In a broader sense, NFTs have positioned digital art as a collectable staple as “the most common types are collectibles and artworks, objects in virtual worlds, and digitalised characters from sports and other games” (Dowling). As a point of origin "NFTs were originally developed using the Ethereum blockchain, [while] many other blockchain networks now facilitate trade and exchange of NFTs” (Wilson et al.). “Given NFTs link to underlying assets that are unique in some way and cannot be exchanged like for like” (Bowden and Jones), this article will consider how artists respond to this uniqueness, which separates the art as simply trading an artefact on a crypto platform, to instead consider a different approach that attests to legitimising the medium as a conceptual space. The concept of NFTs was first introduced in 2012 with Bitcoin’s “Colored Coins”, which referred to tokens that represent any type of physical asset “such as real estate properties, cars and bonds” (Rosenfeld). To that end, the origins of NFTs, as we know, attach themselves to rarities, much the same as any other luxury trading artefact. But where NFTs differ is, as a system, in the non-fungibility of their agency and, as an artefact, the singularity of their rarity and uniqueness. As an example in art, consider a Van Gogh painting where its rarity sustains its value, as there are only a certain number of Van Gogh paintings in circulation. Thus, the value of a Van Gogh painting in the domain of rarity is determined by its metadata with attention to the verification of the authenticity of the artefact and, among others, its subsequent details of the year it was painted. NFTs work along with the same premise: both the Van Gogh painting’s data and an NFT are non-fungible because they cannot be forged, but the painting is fungible because it can be forged. From here, there are two components to associate with NFT art. The first is the NFT, which is the data of a digital token registered on a blockchain. The second is the artefact associated with the NFT, which we know as NFT art. But the system by which NFTs exists as a blockchain is different from, say, buying shares listed in a stock market. Therefore, to find a conceptuality in NFT art, the idea of an NFT artwork as a singular tradable commodity needs to be rethought as not the artefact per se, but the effect of the condition brought about by a combination of the artefact, the currency, and nature of its transaction system. To think of these key points as an independent singularity dismantles any sense of a conceptual framework by which NFT art can exist beyond its form. As McLoughlin argues, “unlike the commercial gallery business model, NFTs are designed to cut out the need for art dealers, enabling artists to trade directly online, typically via specialist auction sites” (McLoughlin). With regards to the GLAM sector, the conceptuality of this disruption positions both the born-digital artefact and the system of trading of the artefact as inextricably linked together. Yet the way this link is considered, even by galleries and curators alike, invites further attention to see NFT art not as a fad, but as a beginning of an entirely new system of the digital genre. Background From an aesthetics perspective, recent hostility surrounding the acceptance of NFT art within the establishment has predictably taken issue with the low-brow nature of mainstream avatar-oriented NFT art; for example, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cryptopunks not surprisingly have been at odds with “proper” art. More so, other artists who have used blockchain in their practice, including Kevin McCoy, Mitchel F. Chan, and Rhea Myers, contributed to early crypto art especially in the 2010s to be inclusive of the proliferation of NFT art as a fine arts medium. Yet despite these contributions, the polarising of NFT art within the art world, as Widdington asserts, has accounted for assumptions that NFT art is identified as being of populous kitsch, lowbrow images, where contemporary art is in opposition to the critique it subjectifies itself against. The art establishment’s disdain towards the aesthetics of NFTs is historically predictable. Early NFT art focussed on pop culture references that have significance within the crypto community (Pepe memes, collectible CryptoKitties), and similarly, in the 1980s, Jeff Koons forced the world of “high art” to confront and accept his works rejoicing in pop culture (Michael Jackson, Pink Panther; Widdington). A key point from Widdington’s claim can be attested for other art that came before Postmodernism, linked firmly to artists using identifiers as part of their studio practice. Moreover, the tying of artwork to a non-fungible identifier is not new. Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #793B Certificate (LeWitt) compounded his manifesto that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” (LeWitt). By adopting the practice that each of his artworks was accompanied by an authenticity certificate, where the identification code forced a fungible asset to be associated with a unique non-fungible asset, it is the ownership of a certificate of authenticity, or a smart contract on the blockchain in the case of an NFT, that makes the artist’s work unique and therein valuable (Widdington). The scarcity of born-digital assets drives demand for collecting NFT art and joins a financial aspect tied to the process of buying and selling crypto assets. This is obviously different from a crypto conceptuality which exists outside the process and thereby manifests in the idea of what intersects the process, and, in the case of NFT artworks, the subject of the image being traded. Just as LeWitt’s certificate of ownership was thought to raise questions about authenticity and uniqueness through abstract thinking, the concept of art derived from NFT art is fundamentally no different. Both use non-fungibility as a condition of their agency to first address what can be copied and what remains as unique. Second, the mechanism of a ledger that, for NFTs, is blockchain and, for a certificate of authenticity, is the assigned number of the unique identifier, regulates scarcity by using a system to define uniqueness. Adopting this manifesto invites a different way to consider NFT art when the main conversation about NFT art in popular journalism or blogging is a narrow discussion either about the legitimacy of NFTs as an authentic financial stock or about the amount of money they transact in collecting the artefacts. One such conceptuality is in the recent NFT artwork of Damien Hirst. NFT Art Damien Hirst’s The Currency “is composed of 10,000 NFTs linked to 10,000 individual spot paintings on paper” (Hawkins) which are inclusive of added security devices within the paper itself to make the physical asset unique. The purchaser can decide if they would like to own the NFT “or ... keep the physical work and relinquish rights to the blockchain-based artwork” (Goldstein). Perspectives of the project, despite the fact that “Hirst has become a renewed critical target in the left and left-liberal media” (White 197) for his NFT project, not to mention being lamented as “Thatcher’s Warhol” (Lemmey), range from indicating “greater fool theory” (Hawkins) to the questioning of a “responsibility to other NFT artists in the market” (Meyohas). However, discussion on the conceptuality created by The Currency, especially its ontology, is muted if not ignored altogether, which this article considers a fundamental oversight in any credible critical assessment of NFT art. Given that Hirst’s artwork has consistently been moulded around conceptual art, whereby the idea of art becomes the artwork not necessarily found in the hand-made aspect of the artefact itself, the idea of The Currency is to question the role and relationship of art and money through an allegory. One might argue that its conceptuality then affords the idea of the artwork being a currency in itself. It speaks to divisibility, just as the cryptocurrency used to purchase the artworks is divisible of its own tender. The disjuncture in this accord is that “NFTs are not currencies themselves, but rather more like records of ownership” (Cornelius 2). The dot paintings on paper are created as unique artefacts where their uniqueness makes them rare, and this uniqueness makes the rarity an increase in financial value. However, subverting this are Hirst’s physical creations, where the legal tender’s conceptuality is manufactured with watermarks, security embeds, and financial markings the same as traded bills. If this perspective is considered a concept, not a digital selli

Adetoun A. Oyelude

Purpose Blockchain technology as a way of preventing data tampering of institutions databases is creating new opportunities for libraries. Digital ledgers can help better track intellectual property rights and ownership for art, commodities, music, film and more. The blockchain technology is used in libraries, archives and museums for data management, in academic publishing and others. Design/methodology/approach Using systematic literature review, and exploring blogs and wikis, data is collected of ways in which blockchain has been used and can be used in the memory institutions. Findings Blockchain is used by some institutions for collection management, offering native protection against data tampering, for decentralized digital identity solutions, and in academic publishing, and also could be used in museums as a means of asserting ownership over an original digital work. Recommendations are made for more specialized use as technology advances. Originality/value Novel ways of using blockchain apart from those used in the financial industry are brought to the fore for libraries, archives and museums. Librarians, archivists and museum curators find links to ways of using blockchain for their work.

Christina Schweiger

Der digitale Wandel hat auch auf die Schule große Auswirkungen. Im Beitrag wird das anhand des Kunstunterrichts gezeigt. Für die rezeptive Praxis bedeutet das neben dem Einsatz digitaler Lehrmaterialien wie Digitalisate von Kunstwerken auch Bezugnahmen auf aktuelle Entwicklungen in der Kunstwelt wie beispielsweise den Hype um NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens, nicht austauschbare digitale Dateneinheiten). Auf beides wird eingegangen und ausgeführt, dass Digitalität und Virtualität den Abgleich mit der physischen Realität verlangen. Deshalb ist es wichtig, im Kunstunterricht nicht nur die Betrachtung von digitalen Reproduktionen, sondern auch die direkte Begegnung mit Originalen zu ermöglichen.

Denis Trček

Abstract Ubiquitous digitization enables promising options for cultural heritage preservation. Therefore, a new approach is presented that considers deployment scenarios by linking heritage science to tourism. Such an approach is necessary because neither technology nor society views can be treated separately to obtain deployable solutions of a wider social, and even national importance. Clearly, while the traditional approaches to cultural heritage preservation will remain a gold standard, they will be increasingly complemented by digital preservation techniques. Thus, based on practical implementations and lessons learnt in other areas, this multidisciplinary framework paper analyses existing disruptive information technologies deployments. In line with the findings it presents a novel technological architecture tailored to the needs of cultural heritage preservation that deploys an open blockchain architecture. The architecture preserves the advantages of traditional blockchains, which made this technology so important, while enabling energy efficient implementations that can be deployed in mobile applications. By additionally using the contribution-ware principle it links it to tourism, where the identification of users focused incentives and business models play a central role. It is obvious that tourism is a good candidate in such preservation efforts due to the organic links between it and cultural heritage and can support further developments in the heritage preservation domain.

Roberto Moro Visconti

No abstract is available for this record.

Shah Nawaz Jelil

NFTs have boomed in the recent past and have implications in several fields of science. In this article, I delve into the implications and potential advantage and challenges in the use of NFTs in the field of conservation science.

Foteini Valeonti, Antonis Bikakis, Melissa Terras, Chris Speed · 6 authors

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) make it technically possible for digital assets to be owned and traded, introducing the concept of scarcity in the digital realm for the first time. Resulting from this technical development, this paper asks the question, do they provide an opportunity for fundraising for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM), by selling ownership of digital copies of their collections? Although NFTs in their current format were first invented in 2017 as a means for game players to trade virtual goods, they reached the mainstream in 2021, when the auction house Christie’s held their first-ever sale exclusively for an NFT of a digital image, that was eventually sold for a record 69 million USD. The potential of NFTs to generate significant revenue for artists and museums by selling effectively a cryptographically signed copy of a digital image (similar to real-world limited editions, which are signed and numbered copies of a given artwork), has sparked the interest of the financially deprived museum and heritage sector with world-renowned institutions such as the Uffizi Gallery and the Hermitage Museum, having already employed NFTs in order to raise funds. Concerns surrounding the environmental impact of blockchain technology and the rise of malicious projects, exploiting previously digitised heritage content made available through OpenGLAM licensing, have attracted criticism over the speculative use of the technology. In this paper, we present the current state of affairs in relation to NFTs and the cultural heritage sector, identifying challenges, whilst highlighting opportunities that they create for revenue generation, in order to help address the ever-increasing financial challenges of galleries and museums.

Frances Liddell

This article considers the notion of shared guardianship in the context of digital museum objects and blockchain technology, arguing that this technology can contribute to the production of value in digital museum objects that goes beyond the monetary. Shared guardianship is understood to be a process of prioritizing the experience of others and forming a diverse set of stakeholders that transforms understandings around ownership; meanwhile, a blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology which can be used to identify digital files and so make them feel ownable and authentic. As such, this paper argues that blockchain technology could create a new layer of materiality and value in digital museum objects which could support the formation of shared guardianship. This question will be analysed in relation to the theoretical underpinnings of digital materiality and a case study project at the National Museums Liverpool, UK, which investigated how to implement blockchain technology in the museum context in order to produce collective ownership and meaningful, connected digital objects.

Stan Sater, Rachel Wright

Museums are places that bring people together from all walks of life to explore, consume, and interact with all types of curated art. These interactions don’t always take place within the walls of a museum. Instead, people may access art and exhibitions through other mediums, such as the Internet, via publications and consumer products. Museums extend their reach with licenses that grant the right to reproduce images of artwork in their collections and utilize data sets about the works themselves. We see the opportunity for data sharing between museums moving their historical records to a distributed ledger backed by blockchain technology. In this format, ownership and copyright data will be complete and shared among cultural institutions and the public facilitating greater access, exploration, and connection of cultural objects and works of art. This Discussion is a conversation on why we see the possibility from a personal perspective and is a broader debate on questions worth addressing individually.

Eugene Ch’ng

Abstract The First Original Copy refers to any first true 3D facsimile of a digitally reproduced physical object. The notion of a copy being the first and original implies that it is unique and therefore the approach used for managing rights and ownership influences its value. Whilst virtual goods traded within virtual worlds are subject to rules and policies, the production of digital objects in the real world does not have a mechanism from which rarity and uniqueness can be guaranteed. Digital copies are subject to further copying and thus, the value of even an exact copy can never be perceived to be equivalent to its original. Through what means can we imbue 3D reproductions of cultural objects with value that is at least asymptotic to their originals? There may be a candidate solution. Discussed in this article is a possible approach for resolving a long-term issue related to authenticity, ownership, perpetuity, and the quantitative tracking of value associated with 3D copies. Blockchains essentially bring the systemic management of virtual objects within virtual worlds into the real world. This forum article examines the candidate solution by answering the questions above, and discusses the issues associated with the concept of the First Original Copy.

Pascal Ughetto

For almost one century in museums, constant debates have dealt with accessibility of their contents to laymen. Part of these stakes are directly embodied in professional practices and meanings. This has resulted in the conceptualization of museums as organizations, composed of specialized professional groups. These are supposed to cooperate for collective targets and diverse ends but are also supporting rival and conflicting views. In the French institutional arrangements, this is all the more so that professional boundaries are institutionalized a a strict distinction between conservateurs and those, of diverse occupations, who claim to act as médiateurs, specialized on making collections more understandable for non experts. For their British or North American counterparts, institutional definitions conversely encompass various possible modes of acting as a curator, from a dominant scientific activity on collections to mainly devoting oneself to make collections more accessible-what the North American historical path has constructed as an 'interpretation' activity. Common, however, is the historical controversy about what a museum is about and what sort of practices are required. Are museums basically devoted to the conservation of collections and the scholar activity of studying them scientifically, or should museums staff be invited to think of themselves as members of organizations devoted to their publics? In this second case then is the expert activity partly deprived of its legitimacy by the obstacles it creates for profane perfect understanding of collections. Be they members of a same profession of curators or divided between conservateurs and various sorts of médiateurs, professional segments debate of what is fundamentally making museums useful for their publics, what is expected of the institution and of the individuals, what are legitimate activities and ways of practicing them. Fine arts museums are particularly exposed to such controversies, as they historically have been erected as symbols of temples forcing laymen to undisputable respect and celebration, admiration of the grandiose value of works and artists much more than beneficiating from experts' efforts to deliver accessible explanations of their knowledge. The paper will argue that this is less a matter of 'interpreting' versus behaving as a curator badly concerned with non-experts than of what are the intrinsic difficulties of communicating scientific results by and within the technical support of an exhibition. Exhibitions have developed since the 19th century not only as entertaining places for a large audience but also as a means of advancing knowledge on artists and their works. In other words, they are scenes of scientific debate on what scholars know on artists and works; they aim at explaining whom one particular painting has been attributed to and why it now should be attributed to another; they bring proofs about what is the exact value of this painter compared to that when replaced in the historical evolution of the artist or his/her movement, and so on. But at the same time and unlike most classical scientific scenes, a public is there, more or less consciously and competently interpreting the scene as an expert debate. When scientific activity is under sociological scrutiny, it generally is about scientists such as biologists, chemists, and so on. In the paper, the focus will be on curators as involved -entrapped?- in a specific scientific field and its constraints on how we produce knowledge and how we communicate results in such a field. In this perspective, exhibition is a fundamentally contradictory arrangement, compelled to convey conviction of experts and simultaneously to respond to expectations of various non-expert audiences. Scientific activity of fine arts curators is dealing with attributing value to works and artists, defining a scientific value, which contributes to determine commercial value. This is the professional stake of curators, forced to practice within organizational contexts. Analysis will be based on the exhibition 'Raphaël, les dernières années' (Louvre, Paris, 2012-2013), which has given rise to a public controversy about what it tried to show out and its object's relevance: it has been criticized for excessively trying to decide if details in the paintings should really be attributed to Raphael or to which of its students. Scenography, the choice of works and artists exhibited, texts (cards explaining works, catalogue, etc.) will be studied. They are not peripheral but central in the controversy in their various performance in making it clear what was the exhibition scientific major stake, namely dealing with a critique born in the 19th century about the value of Raphael end-life painting.

Peter Linett

My congratulations to you—or should that be my sympathies?—on being chosen as Curator’s next Books Editor. On the positive side, you’re joining a team of thoughtful, creative editors who manage to generate sparks of camaraderie even though we’re scattered around the country. Your postal carrier and UPS driver will soon begin delivering a steady stream of books from academic and commercial publishers—review copies and sometimes bound proofs, all with chipper press releases slipped inside the covers and publishers’ glossy catalogues spilling out of the envelopes. Your bookshelves will gradually come to resemble mine, and visitors who don’t know about your editorial work will be wowed by the breadth and idiosyncratic coolness of your interests, which will appear to run from Pueblo pottery to Islamic calligraphy by way of the anthropology of world’s fairs and the latest scholarship in cultural property law and “glass studies.” Who else, your friends will wonder admiringly, would own that gorgeous coffee-table book celebrating Traditional Archery from Six Continents? Yes, the environmentally unfriendly truth is that a fair percentage of the books you’ll receive for Curator you’ll have no intention of getting reviewed, for the sensible reason that they’re not really about museums—their work or history or guiding ideas—and have little light to shed on those topics except indirectly and in the aggregate. Instead they’re about the objects that museums exhibit or the technical study and preservation of those objects. So they tend to appeal mostly to people who are already interested in and at least somewhat knowledgeable about those kinds of objects or the periods and places associated with them—which in many cases is a small, specialized audience. (If this sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because museums themselves have been accused of focusing on certain classes of objects largely for the benefit of people who already recognize and care about those classes. Not surprisingly, many of the review copies in this category are exhibition catalogues or scholarly texts published in association with new or upcoming exhibitions.) In other words, rather than books about museum practice, these are books of—that is, exemplifying or representing—museum practice. If museums’ traditional activities of collection, preservation, study, and public exhibition can be thought of as a kind of object-based discourse, then what you’re looking for as Curator’s Books Editor is a meta-discourse: stepping back from those activities in order to consider their origins, meanings, functions, and futures. Of course, a variety of those “about” books will arrive in your mail slot as well—books like Museums after Modernism or Museums and Community, books about trends in exhibition design, zoo history, visitor motivations, green museum construction, museum marketing, informal science education, museum philosophy, and the like. A quick taxonomy of these “about” books might be organized around a distinction—or rather, a continuum—between texts written by academics and those written by museum practitioners. At one end of that continuum are books from scholars in various branches of the humanities or social sciences (or, less frequently, the natural sciences) who happen to be interested in museums or museological issues from one angle or another. (Considered as a whole, the museum field is almost absurdly multidisciplinary, as East [2008] and others have reported.) Sometimes that interest is merely one among many and results in a single book about museums; in other cases the interest becomes primary and is sustained over a career. In the increasingly busy middle of the spectrum are texts by museum studies faculty. Here we may want to distinguish between museum studies programs that are . . . well, academic—theory-oriented, historically minded, linked closely to other university departments via interdisciplinary collaborations—and programs that keep one foot in scholarship but lean toward practice, whose faculty members often work in or consult to museums in addition to teaching. These latter programs may be interdisciplinary, but they’re also extradisciplinary: some of their priorities have less to do with the pursuit and creation of knowledge in some recognized domain than with preparing today’s and tomorrow’s museum professionals for the practical challenges they’ll face. Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, are books by the museum professionals themselves, including staff and consultants. Those professional books are the tip of an iceberg of museum discourse that also includes “gray literature” (conference presentations, blog postings, proprietary research reports commissioned by museums, and so on) as well as peer-reviewed journal articles and national research studies. Of course, many books fall somewhere between these categories. It’s a continuum for good reason. There have been collaborations between academics and museum practitioners; volumes of essays by museum professionals who write from essentially academic perspectives; scholarly musings about the minutiae of museum practice (for purposes other than professional training); and so on. It used to be easier to see the difference between the insider view (museum professionals writing largely for each other) and the outsider view (academics writing about museums, often critically and also for each other). But over the last two decades or so, the academic left’s critique of museums, which began emphatically outside the museum—think of the line that runs from Michel Foucault to Tony Bennett, Carol Duncan, Alan Wallach, and others—has been internalized (some would say co-opted) by museum studies programs and even by some influential museum professionals. What was once a disturbing attack that felt to museum practitioners “like being psychoanalyzed in public,” as one of our book reviewers put it a few years ago (Lindauer 2007, 362), has gradually informed the profession’s own rhetoric about its challenges and ideals. I think of Stephen Weil, Elaine Heumann Gurian, Robert Janes, and Nina Simon, although the influence of the postmodern academics on these commentators’ work seems mostly indirect. Our taxonomy would also have to take into account these books’ subject matter and what type or types of museums they deal with. It could draw distinctions between books by a single author, multi-author collaborative works, and collections of essays by various independent contributors. (The latter category includes the museum studies anthologies that have been published with increasing frequency in recent years.) Or between university presses, independent nonprofit presses, and commercial publishing houses. (You’ll occasionally receive an art-forgery saga or a great-man-of-science biography from the latter.) Or between museum studies programs in North America and those in the U.K. or other English-speaking countries. Constructing such a taxonomy in earnest would be a valuable service to the field, and I hope others take up the thread. My hope here is simply to give us a framework for discussing the challenge you’re undertaking. The good news, and the reason for those congratulations I offered, is that some of these museum books are terrific. The best of them may give you, as they’ve given me, a feeling of prickling excitement—a sense that something is at stake, is being risked. How they do this varies, of course. Whether or not you find a book exciting will have as much to do with you as with the book: we get most charged up about what we agree with and what we’re already invested in. (“A real book is not one that we read,” W.H. Auden observed, “but one that reads us.”) Still, as I pass the torch—or rather, the editor’s red pen—to you I’ll mention some of the characteristics I’ve been grateful to find on the page in the seven years I’ve been Curator’s Books Editor. Good museum books reveal the ways in which the familiar ideas and practices of museology (past or present, depending on the author’s project) are contingent rather than given. They put some critical distance between us and museums, making the ordinary seem unfamiliar, even strange. With the benefit of that distance, the authors are able to interrogate the actions, rhetoric, and structures of museums at a fundamental level. This is not easy for insiders to do; we have trouble seeing the assumptions we operate within every day. Philosopher and sometime-museum-historian Stephen Asma has likened this ability to “tasting your own tongue”—an illustration of how difficult it is (Asma 2001, 154). Good museum books also manage to ground themselves in the relevant literature or practice area while also lighting out for new territory. That balance is important. Without knowledge of what museum people have been arguing about, a new perspective reads as merely naïve. Conversely, without something new to say, the contribution feels like hackwork—an apologia for the status quo (a problem I’ll come back to in a moment). When good museum books do borrow theoretical constructs and examples from other domains, they do so in ways that preserve the complexity of those ideas and respect what’s irreducibly foreign about them—aspects that aren’t neatly assimilable to the museum issue at hand. More broadly, good authors of museum literature know how to sustain an argument or narrative over many paragraphs or chapters, and they understand the difference between a string of assertions and the methodical intertwining of observation, inference, reference, and persuasively articulated belief that constitutes a genuine argument. Good museum books sometimes raise questions they don’t and can’t answer, which can feel like a radical act in a field that is has been trying for decades to establish certainties about itself and its cultural status. By problematizing rather than tidying up, these books have the potential to influence the collective agenda and spur debate. (I say “potential” because even the best books can do little good if nobody reads them. Jay Rounds has raised disturbing questions about how much of the museum literature is actually consumed and by whom [2007].) The best museum books display wit, in the sense of both mental quickness and disarmingly clever humor. These authors are confident enough to expect that they’ll be taken seriously even though they don’t take themselves too seriously, and relaxed enough to let a little of themselves into their texts, acknowledging the subjectivity inherent in any human enterprise and thereby helping us account for their presence in the argument as we grapple with it. This list could go on: I’ve had the pleasure of discovering museum books that were heroically well-researched, that spun nuanced historical narratives, that offered powerfully simple frameworks for thinking about complex things—frameworks I’ve found indispensable and passed on to colleagues. A few have permanently changed the way I experience and think about museums. The best museum books can be very good indeed. The problem—and the reason I offer sympathies mixed with the congratulations—is that such books are distressingly few and far between. Too many museum books that come across my desk display an intellectual thinness and logical slipperiness that limits their value to both scholarship and practice. They read as competent enough, but if you probe a little, you find they don’t support real analysis. Too often I’ve found myself wondering if there isn’t, at the heart of the text I’m reading, a kind of dodge, something avoided or elided because grappling with it would have been too troublesome or destabilizing. The Duke University interdisciplinary scholar Cathy N. Davidson calls this “fudging,” which she defines as intentionally or unconsciously “glossing over the nuances of a complicated, inconvenient, or even controversial topic” in order to fit in, as it were, within the cozy confines of one’s discipline. She notes that the “evasions and coverups” of fudging “arise most often when a scholar is confronted with the most fundamental and potentially contentious concepts of her discipline.” So fudging is “emotionally fraught, making you susceptible to exposure,” and instances of it in a text tend to be heralded by a momentary grandiosity that both marks and masks anxiety (Davidson 2009). Although Davidson has in mind science, literature, and other fields, her analysis captures something all too common in museum books. Too many museum books operate within a narrow and convenient sphere of reference, drawing mostly from sources, ideas, and examples already present within museum discourse. (Such books are about museums in a much narrower sense than, say, history books are about history, because the latter is inherently outward-referring: its subject—the human narrative—lies outside itself. Does an analogous dualism exist in museum studies?) This is especially true of books by and for museum practitioners, which sometimes feel hermetically sealed within the bubble of museums’ most gratifying assumptions about themselves. Even on the academic side of the spectrum, many are rife with what has been called (in another context) “unexamined postulates that answer the question before it is asked” (Ragland-Sullivan 1987, xvii). New or foreign ideas from various disciplines do make their way into these books, of course, but they tend to be ones that confirm rather than unsettle the ways museum people see themselves and their institutions and are often applied in reductive ways that reveal the author’s about the in which the The is a kind of in which the text can museum or practice, even when its seems to want to or Too many museum books make they don’t for argument and an of or for Those in can be of the because out that an has been before by is not the as that to it can the of Too much museum literature on this of which an of the is much I being about these If so, I’m not I a at a museum studies to review a new written by a museum scholar at another whose work she A after the she to she think it was her to review or the museum to were in no with much The book even her wonder about the of the press in which she had already as the of some to the museum they questions have come up in book we on my although they’ve been raised In one a at the University of a museum studies that the to the had the to their own or difficult questions with . . . and and that the had to the articles with each other or the they reviewers have for intellectual and we’re at and than they found in the sometimes texts they It’s that all of these books, including the one as were to an independent review in addition to editorial review before being for So at least two museum studies scholars or museum professionals not with the read each the author’s sometimes with This us that people will on such is to some in the of the But it also questions about the value of the review which may display some of the as the literature whose it is to it’s the of people most of the writing for and the of for and one might expect the and to both at the level. It might be easier for one museum to another to when a than to her own writing to those but it’s that she would have in mind very in the two the that those the profession’s or of can work There are also what we might on the of the review as you’ll see in the of your work with this journal articles also The review is to be but the museum is a sometimes it’s not for reviewers to the of the of the book or they’ve been or for the who those via to their The of people in those two is small, and they each in order to the they and so can work Of course, the of review are of the out the to our taxonomy of museum books and to it the distinctions been making between good museum books and their less but our continuum that runs from academic to or to practice, with museum studies programs in the It will come as no at the academic end and in some books by museum studies the critical which museums are is and the sphere of in which they’re is than at the professional The academics are also at museums among other human and to from other disciplines to understand both of which can be of the most are and while many work in museum natural history museums, few have museum the of their of and are also on the academic side, with What the professional and research reports written by museum practitioners or least in is too many of these books are on and so they fall into the category after be the practitioners who write these books aren’t trying to knowledge for its own they’re trying to support or museums in what they often by and that can be applied So it could be that I’m the of one type of museum literature another and with the But aren’t knowledge and practice of the we to do the in order to the and a little of our and us to do some in my outsider and academic museum books as as a than those by and for practitioners, most museum professionals the academic literature because they think it’s not too theoretical and to them their practical and as and have observed, the of scholarly writing may run than museum staff are of ideas and concepts that appear to But if I’m that books on the academic end of the spectrum are to outside concepts and to on museum then what we have is a between and breadth of in the will This is and are some of the ways new ideas a of practice, and new ideas can that with the it practitioners who academic books about museums are an to their own and I would the even in What museum professionals and museum scholars really to and books that aren’t about museums but which might shed light on the museum enterprise if we can read them with our I’m not to and although these may be relevant in certain this a of I’m that for you work at a science museum or are how science museums their purposes and you for the recent on in or the and you might a of The of a of the and from the and and give some thought to the between an and a (If you’re like me, you’ll at a science exhibit the way Or you could out another this from your into literature, at the of which the of narrative and in the of science concepts than any museum book could read and the for with its of how science from and in human somewhat to of a an on museological truth and by the of of these books raise questions about science museum and and these questions are in kind from those raised by the museum own literature on the they’re and rather than Even by to we something about what’s in the a science or natural history an At the I those coffee-table exhibition catalogues and technical as for a review in Curator on the that they really “about” museums, but were examples or museum here I’m for us to to books that are not “about” museums. The difference is that outsider books like because of their can be read as of museum practice and for new most exhibition catalogues are assertions of the of one over another. It’s not that we should be the outsider books of those that are about museums. should be them museum books, and we should be much to the museological questions they and the they If we can make that in our we may be able to take new in our scholarship and practice. you be able to review many of those outsider books in no matter how their for our be too busy trying to keep up with the stream of books about museums, of which seem to be published each as museum studies programs their to the new their to and museums themselves to in and around the I to seeing which you from this stream to review in Curator and which ones you to your between The of and More I to seeing how the reviewers you to write those to the and the they find in those A literature is as good as its by and can we that our books will be written and are all Your as Curator’s Books Editor will be to museum scholars and practitioners of what’s at each we put to or the of a