CREATING REGIMES OF VALUE THROUGH CURATION AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF KOREA

Abstract

The National Museum of Korea (NMK) is a site for teaching its visitors about the wonders of the Korean past through exhibition of exemplary art works. Through participant-observation in a Korean art history program organized by the NMK, museum visits, an interview with a senior curator, and an analysis of the NMK’s self-published book 100 Highlights of the National Museum of Korea, I interrogate the museum’s ideology in order to gain a better understanding of the messages about Koreanness communicated to the museum’s visitors. I am interested in the curatorial choices made by the museum that may ideologically condition spectators to associate Korean artistic excellence with Buddhism. I combine an analysis of language used in curation of Bud-dhist art on museum labels and displays, and within the NMK’s self-published book of 100 museum highlights, with a discussion that illustrates how the NMK creates new regimes of value in its presentation of Buddhist objects as national heritage.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.