No two houses of the holy
Creating cultural heritage in 'Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses'
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.33411Keywords:
Experience Music Project, media, museums, Nirvana, popular musicAbstract
Using the Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition as a case study, this article offers one possible answer to the question: what is needed for popular music to become cultural heritage? It looks at how the exhibition’s use of material culture and its relation to intangible culture provide opportunities for audience engagement and establish the exhibition as a site for the production of cultural heritage. Drawing upon work done in both heritage and popular music studies, I argue that the exhibition thesis, its design and the integration of participatory opportunities create a congregant space, one in which heritage’s characteristic operation of establishing a relationship between present and past in order to facilitate inheritance is realized in a manner that offers a dynamic and variable image of membership.
References
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Bell, Thomas. L. 1998. ‘Why Seattle? An Examination of an Alternative Rock Culture Hearth’. Journal of Cultural Geography 18/1: 35–47 .https://doi.org/10.1080/08873639809478311
Bennett, Andy. 2009. ‘“Heritage Rock”: Rock Music, Representation and Heritage Discourse’. Poetics 37: 474–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2009.09.006
Bennett, Andy, and Richard A. Peterson. 2004. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge.
Brabazon, Tara. 2006. ‘Museums and Popular Culture Revisited: Kevin Moore and the Politics of Pop’. Museum Management and Curatorship 21/4: 283–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647770600502104
Bruce, Chris. 2006. ‘Spectacle and Democracy: Experience Music Project as Post-Museum’. In New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction, ed. Janet Marstine, 129–51. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470776230.ch5
Buckley, David. 2003. ‘Halls of Fame/Museums’. In Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Vol. 1: Media, Industry and Society, 29–31. London and New York: Continuum.
Carliner, Saul. 2001. ‘Modeling Information for Three-Dimensional Space’. Technical Communication 48/1: 66–81.
Carman, John. 2010. ‘Promotion to Heritage: How Museum Objects are Made’. In Encouraging Collections Mobility: A Way Forward for Museums in Europe, ed. Susanna Petterson, Monika Hagedorn-Saupe, Teijamari Jyrkkio and Astrid Weij, 74–85. Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery.
Caron, Daniel J., and Richard Brown. 2011. ‘The Documentary Moment in the Digital Age: Establishing New Value Propositions for Public Memory’. Archivaria 71: 1–20.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Coffee, Kevin. 2008. ‘Cultural Inclusion, Exclusion and the Formative Roles of Museums’. Museum Management and Curatorship 23/3: 261–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647770802234078
Cohen, Sara. 2007. Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Confino, Alon. 1997. ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’. American Historical Review: 1386–1403.
Connell, John, and Chris Gibson. 2003. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity, and Place. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203448397
Cross, Charles R. 2002. Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. New York: Hyperion Books.
Davison, Patricia. 2005. ‘Museums and the Re-shaping of Memory’. In Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader, ed. Gerard Corsane, 184–94. New York: Routledge. ttps://doi.org/10.4324/9780203326350_chapter_14
de Groot, Jerome. 2009. Consuming History. New York: Routledge.
Falk, John, and Lynn Dierking. 1992. The Museum Experience. Washington: Whalesback Books.
Garling, Caleb. 2011. ‘Seattle Band Map Charts a Sprawling Music Scene’. Wired. 1 March. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/03/seattle-band-map/
Gillett, Charlie. 1983. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 2nd edn. London: Souvenir Press.
Gleason, Ralph J. 1969. The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound. New York: Ballantine Books.
Graves-Brown, Paul. 2010. ‘Nowhere Man: Urban Life and the Virtualization of Popular Music’. Popular Music History 4/2: 220–41. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i2.220
Greenberg, Reesa. 1996. ‘The Exhibition Redistributed: A Case for Reassessing Space’. In Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, 349–67. New York: Routledge.
Gurian, Elaine Huemann. 1999. ‘What is the Object of This Exercise: A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums’. Daedalus 128/3: 163–83.
—2002. ‘Choosing among the Options: An Opinion about Museum Definitions’. Curator 45/2: 75–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2002.tb01182.x
—2005. ‘A Blurring of Boundaries’. In Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader, ed. Gerard Corsane, 71–77. New York: Routledge.
Hamilton, Paula, and Linda Shopes. 2008. Oral History and Public Memories. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hertzman, Emily, David Anderson and Susan Rowley. 2008. ‘Edutainment Heritage Tourist Attractions: A Portrait of Visitors’ Experiences at Storyeum’. Museum Management and Curatorship 23/2: 155–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647770802012227
Hesmondhalgh, David, and Keith Negus. 2002. Popular Music Studies. London: Arnold.
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 1992. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. New York: Routledge.
—1999. ‘Education, Communication and Interpretation: Towards a Critical Pedagogy in Museums’. In The Educational Role of the Museum, ed. E. Hooper-Greenhill, 3–27. London and New York: Routledge.
Horner, Bruce, and Thomas Swiss. 1999. Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Huq, Rupa. 2006. Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth and Identity in a Postcolonial World. New York: Taylor & Francis.
Jordanova, Ludmilla. 1989. ‘Objects of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on Museums’. The New Museology, ed. Peter Vergo, 22–40. London: Reaktion Books.
Karp, I., and S. D. Lavine, eds. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kavanagh, G., ed. 1996. Making Histories in Museums. London and New York: Leicester University Press.
Kirshenblatt-Gimlett, Barbara. 1995. ‘Theorizing Heritage’. Ethnomusicology 39/3: 367–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/924627
Kong, Lily. 1999 ‘The Invention of Heritage: Popular Music in Singapore’. Asian Studies Review 23/1: 1–25.
Leonard, Marion. 2007. ‘Constructing Histories through Material Culture: Popular Music, Museums and Collecting’. Popular Music History 2/2: 147–60. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v2i2.147
—2010. ‘Exhibiting Popular Music: Museum Audiences, Inclusion and Social History’. Journal of New Music Research 39/2: 171–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2010.494199
Leonard, Marion, and Robert Strachan. 2010. The Beat Goes On: Liverpool, Popular Music and the Changing City. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Macdonald, Sharon, ed. 1998. The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. New York: Routledge.
Marcus, Greil. 1975. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’n’roll Music. New York: E.P. Dutton.
McMurray, Jacob. 2011. Taking Punk to the Masses: From Nowhere to Nevermind. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books.
McRobbie, Angela, and Jenny Garber. 1976. ‘Girls and Subcultures: An Exploration’. In Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 209–222. London: Unwin-Hyman.
Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Moore, Kevin. 1997. Museums and Popular Culture. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Moser, Stephanie. 2010. ‘The Devil is in the Details: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge’. Museum Anthropology 33/1: 22–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1379.2010.01072.x
Oehler, Susan, and Jason Hanley. 2009. ‘Perspectives of Popular Music Pedagogy in Practice: An Introduction’. Journal of Popular Music Studies 21/1: 2–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2009.01167.x
Palmer, Catherine. 2005. ‘An Ethnography of Englishness: Experiencing Identity through Tourism’. Annals of Tourism Research: 7–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2004.04.006
Parr, Joy, Jessica Van Horssen and Jon van der Veen. 2009. ‘The Practice of History Shared across Differences: Needs, Technologies, and Ways of Knowing in the Megaprojects New Media Project’. Journal of Canadian Studies 43/1: 35–58. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs.43.1.35
Parry, Ross. 2007. Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203347485
—2008. ‘Afterword: The Future in Our Hands? Putting Potential into Practice’. In Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience: Handheld Guides and Other Media, ed. Loic Tallon and Kevin Walker, 179–94. Toronto: Altamira Press.
Pearce, Susan. 1995. On Collecting: An Investigation Into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge.
Peña Ovalle, Priscilla. 2009. ‘Synesthetic Sabor: Translation and Popular Knowledge in American Sabor’. American Quarterly 61/4: 979–96. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.0.0106
Poria, Yaniv, Richard Butler and David Airey. 2003. ‘The Core of Heritage Tourism’. Annals of Tourism Research 30/1: 238–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-7383(02)00064-6
Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London and New York: Faber and Faber.
Shank, Barry. 1994. Dissonant Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
Simon, Nina. 2010. The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0.
Stanbridge, Alan. 2005. ‘Display Options: Discourses of Art and Context in the Contemporary Museum’. International Journal of Cultural Policy 11/2: 157–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286630500198146
Taylor, Timothy Dean. 1997. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. London and New York: Routledge.
True, Everett. 2006. Nirvana: The True Story. London: Omnibus Press.
Watson, Sheila, ed. 2007. Museums and their Communities. New York: Routledge.
Webb, Peter. 2007. Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures. New York: Routledge.
Whitehead, Chris. 2005. ‘Visiting with Suspicion: Recent Perspectives on Art and Art Museums’. In Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader, ed. Gerard Corsane, 89–101. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203326350_chapter_8
Whiteley, Sheila, Andy Bennett and Stan Hawkins, eds. 2004. Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Witcomb, Andrea. 2003. Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203361023
Zuberi, Nabeel. 2001. Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Bell, Thomas. L. 1998. ‘Why Seattle? An Examination of an Alternative Rock Culture Hearth’. Journal of Cultural Geography 18/1: 35–47 .https://doi.org/10.1080/08873639809478311
Bennett, Andy. 2009. ‘“Heritage Rock”: Rock Music, Representation and Heritage Discourse’. Poetics 37: 474–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2009.09.006
Bennett, Andy, and Richard A. Peterson. 2004. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge.
Brabazon, Tara. 2006. ‘Museums and Popular Culture Revisited: Kevin Moore and the Politics of Pop’. Museum Management and Curatorship 21/4: 283–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647770600502104
Bruce, Chris. 2006. ‘Spectacle and Democracy: Experience Music Project as Post-Museum’. In New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction, ed. Janet Marstine, 129–51. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470776230.ch5
Buckley, David. 2003. ‘Halls of Fame/Museums’. In Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Vol. 1: Media, Industry and Society, 29–31. London and New York: Continuum.
Carliner, Saul. 2001. ‘Modeling Information for Three-Dimensional Space’. Technical Communication 48/1: 66–81.
Carman, John. 2010. ‘Promotion to Heritage: How Museum Objects are Made’. In Encouraging Collections Mobility: A Way Forward for Museums in Europe, ed. Susanna Petterson, Monika Hagedorn-Saupe, Teijamari Jyrkkio and Astrid Weij, 74–85. Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery.
Caron, Daniel J., and Richard Brown. 2011. ‘The Documentary Moment in the Digital Age: Establishing New Value Propositions for Public Memory’. Archivaria 71: 1–20.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Coffee, Kevin. 2008. ‘Cultural Inclusion, Exclusion and the Formative Roles of Museums’. Museum Management and Curatorship 23/3: 261–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647770802234078
Cohen, Sara. 2007. Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Confino, Alon. 1997. ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’. American Historical Review: 1386–1403.
Connell, John, and Chris Gibson. 2003. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity, and Place. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203448397
Cross, Charles R. 2002. Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. New York: Hyperion Books.
Davison, Patricia. 2005. ‘Museums and the Re-shaping of Memory’. In Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader, ed. Gerard Corsane, 184–94. New York: Routledge. ttps://doi.org/10.4324/9780203326350_chapter_14
de Groot, Jerome. 2009. Consuming History. New York: Routledge.
Falk, John, and Lynn Dierking. 1992. The Museum Experience. Washington: Whalesback Books.
Garling, Caleb. 2011. ‘Seattle Band Map Charts a Sprawling Music Scene’. Wired. 1 March. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/03/seattle-band-map/
Gillett, Charlie. 1983. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 2nd edn. London: Souvenir Press.
Gleason, Ralph J. 1969. The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound. New York: Ballantine Books.
Graves-Brown, Paul. 2010. ‘Nowhere Man: Urban Life and the Virtualization of Popular Music’. Popular Music History 4/2: 220–41. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i2.220
Greenberg, Reesa. 1996. ‘The Exhibition Redistributed: A Case for Reassessing Space’. In Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, 349–67. New York: Routledge.
Gurian, Elaine Huemann. 1999. ‘What is the Object of This Exercise: A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums’. Daedalus 128/3: 163–83.
—2002. ‘Choosing among the Options: An Opinion about Museum Definitions’. Curator 45/2: 75–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2002.tb01182.x
—2005. ‘A Blurring of Boundaries’. In Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader, ed. Gerard Corsane, 71–77. New York: Routledge.
Hamilton, Paula, and Linda Shopes. 2008. Oral History and Public Memories. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hertzman, Emily, David Anderson and Susan Rowley. 2008. ‘Edutainment Heritage Tourist Attractions: A Portrait of Visitors’ Experiences at Storyeum’. Museum Management and Curatorship 23/2: 155–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647770802012227
Hesmondhalgh, David, and Keith Negus. 2002. Popular Music Studies. London: Arnold.
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 1992. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. New York: Routledge.
—1999. ‘Education, Communication and Interpretation: Towards a Critical Pedagogy in Museums’. In The Educational Role of the Museum, ed. E. Hooper-Greenhill, 3–27. London and New York: Routledge.
Horner, Bruce, and Thomas Swiss. 1999. Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Huq, Rupa. 2006. Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth and Identity in a Postcolonial World. New York: Taylor & Francis.
Jordanova, Ludmilla. 1989. ‘Objects of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on Museums’. The New Museology, ed. Peter Vergo, 22–40. London: Reaktion Books.
Karp, I., and S. D. Lavine, eds. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kavanagh, G., ed. 1996. Making Histories in Museums. London and New York: Leicester University Press.
Kirshenblatt-Gimlett, Barbara. 1995. ‘Theorizing Heritage’. Ethnomusicology 39/3: 367–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/924627
Kong, Lily. 1999 ‘The Invention of Heritage: Popular Music in Singapore’. Asian Studies Review 23/1: 1–25.
Leonard, Marion. 2007. ‘Constructing Histories through Material Culture: Popular Music, Museums and Collecting’. Popular Music History 2/2: 147–60. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v2i2.147
—2010. ‘Exhibiting Popular Music: Museum Audiences, Inclusion and Social History’. Journal of New Music Research 39/2: 171–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2010.494199
Leonard, Marion, and Robert Strachan. 2010. The Beat Goes On: Liverpool, Popular Music and the Changing City. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Macdonald, Sharon, ed. 1998. The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. New York: Routledge.
Marcus, Greil. 1975. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’n’roll Music. New York: E.P. Dutton.
McMurray, Jacob. 2011. Taking Punk to the Masses: From Nowhere to Nevermind. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books.
McRobbie, Angela, and Jenny Garber. 1976. ‘Girls and Subcultures: An Exploration’. In Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 209–222. London: Unwin-Hyman.
Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Moore, Kevin. 1997. Museums and Popular Culture. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Moser, Stephanie. 2010. ‘The Devil is in the Details: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge’. Museum Anthropology 33/1: 22–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1379.2010.01072.x
Oehler, Susan, and Jason Hanley. 2009. ‘Perspectives of Popular Music Pedagogy in Practice: An Introduction’. Journal of Popular Music Studies 21/1: 2–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2009.01167.x
Palmer, Catherine. 2005. ‘An Ethnography of Englishness: Experiencing Identity through Tourism’. Annals of Tourism Research: 7–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2004.04.006
Parr, Joy, Jessica Van Horssen and Jon van der Veen. 2009. ‘The Practice of History Shared across Differences: Needs, Technologies, and Ways of Knowing in the Megaprojects New Media Project’. Journal of Canadian Studies 43/1: 35–58. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs.43.1.35
Parry, Ross. 2007. Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203347485
—2008. ‘Afterword: The Future in Our Hands? Putting Potential into Practice’. In Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience: Handheld Guides and Other Media, ed. Loic Tallon and Kevin Walker, 179–94. Toronto: Altamira Press.
Pearce, Susan. 1995. On Collecting: An Investigation Into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge.
Peña Ovalle, Priscilla. 2009. ‘Synesthetic Sabor: Translation and Popular Knowledge in American Sabor’. American Quarterly 61/4: 979–96. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.0.0106
Poria, Yaniv, Richard Butler and David Airey. 2003. ‘The Core of Heritage Tourism’. Annals of Tourism Research 30/1: 238–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-7383(02)00064-6
Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London and New York: Faber and Faber.
Shank, Barry. 1994. Dissonant Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
Simon, Nina. 2010. The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0.
Stanbridge, Alan. 2005. ‘Display Options: Discourses of Art and Context in the Contemporary Museum’. International Journal of Cultural Policy 11/2: 157–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286630500198146
Taylor, Timothy Dean. 1997. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. London and New York: Routledge.
True, Everett. 2006. Nirvana: The True Story. London: Omnibus Press.
Watson, Sheila, ed. 2007. Museums and their Communities. New York: Routledge.
Webb, Peter. 2007. Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures. New York: Routledge.
Whitehead, Chris. 2005. ‘Visiting with Suspicion: Recent Perspectives on Art and Art Museums’. In Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader, ed. Gerard Corsane, 89–101. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203326350_chapter_8
Whiteley, Sheila, Andy Bennett and Stan Hawkins, eds. 2004. Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Witcomb, Andrea. 2003. Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203361023
Zuberi, Nabeel. 2001. Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Published
2017-04-07
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Pirrie Adams, K. (2017). No two houses of the holy: Creating cultural heritage in ’Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses’. Popular Music History, 10(2), 113-137. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.33411
