Curating Pop

Curating Pop speaks to the rapidly growing interest in the study of popular music exhibitions, which has occurred alongside the increasing number of popular music museums in operation across the world. Focusing on curatorial practices and processes, this book draws on interviews with museum workers and curators from twenty museums globally, including the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, the Experience Music Project in Seattle and the PopMuseum in Prague. Through a consideration of the subjective experiences of curators involved in the exhibition of popular music in museums in a range of geographic locations, Curating Pop compares institutional practices internationally, illustrating the ways in which popular music history is presented to visitors in a wider sense.

Sarah Baker is Professor in Cultural Sociology at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. She is the author of Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (2011), Teaching Youth Studies Through Popular Culture (2014), Community Custodians of Popular Music's Past: A DIY Approach to Heritage (2017) and the editor of Redefining Mainstream Popular Music (2013), Youth Cultures and Subcultures: Australian Perspectives(2015), Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-Yourself, Do-It-Together(2015), The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage (2018) and Remembering Popular Music's Past: Memory-Heritage-History (2019).

List of figures and tables Acknowledgments 1. Curatorial practice in popular music museums: an introduction 2. Canonic representations: the celebration of dominant (and hidden) histories 3. Selling the museum experience: curation, economies, and visitor experience 4. Popular music and place: local, national and global stories 5. Treating objects like art: curating material culture 6. Telling stories: narratives of popular music's past 7. Curator subjectivity: influence and bias in popular music exhibitions 8. Living history: nostalgia as affective curatorial practice 9. Managing the music: Sound in the popular music museum 10. Beyond the typology: concluding thoughts References Index Museums covered: Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (Nashville, United States) Arts Centre Melbourne (Melbourne, Australia) KD's Elvis Presley Museum (Hawera, North Island, New Zealand) Powerhouse Museum (Sydney, Australia) Australian Country Music Hall of Fame (Tamworth, Australia) Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (Cleveland, United States) Georgia Music Hall of Fame (Macon, United States) Experience Music Project (EMP) (Seattle, United States) Heart of Texas Country Music Museum (Brady, United States) PopMuseum (Prague, Czech Republic) Hector Country Music Museum (Hector, South Island, New Zealand) Museum RockArt (Hoek van Holland, the Netherlands) Reykjanes Museum of Heritage (Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland) Ramones Museum (Berlin, Germany) Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (Hilversum, the Netherlands) The Grammy Museum (Los Angeles, United States) British Music Experience (BME) (London, United Kingdom) Tónlistarsafn Íslands (Kópavogur, Iceland) National Museum of African American Music (Nashville, United States)