Frames within Frames

Counterpoints publishes the most compelling and imaginative books being written in education today. Grounded on the theoretical advances in criticalism, feminism and postmodernism in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Counterpoints engages the meaning of these innovations in various forms of educational expression. Committed to the proposition that theoretical literature should be accessible to a variety of audiences, the series insists that its authors avoid esoteric and jargonistic languages that transform educational scholarship into an elite discourse for the initiated.

The art museum has changed shape. Its bricks have been flattened on paper, celluloid, and plastic and diffused into virtual spaces. The relationship between flesh and environment has been irrevocably changed as people no longer have to attend the architectural structure of the art museum to know the art museum. It recurs infinitely in our daily lives on television, movie, and computer screens; in books and magazines; and on urban artifacts from matchbook covers to billboards. These representations may not be real art museums per se, but they provide the basis upon which most people now partake of the museum's sacred rituals. Suzanne Oberhardt offers a new way of seeing the art museum as it is transformed and reinvented in the twenty-first century.

Autorentext
The Author: Suzanne Oberhardt received her Ph.D. from the School of Visual Arts at the Pennsylvania State University. She has worked in the visual arts and art museum sectors as lecturer, consultant, administrator, curator, and policy adviser. She is interested in the popular culture dimensions of galleries and museums, new media applications in the arts, material culture studies, and cultural criticism.