Paper short abstract:

This paper is part of a larger research project investigating how economic realities and new public management affect how museums hone their collections for the future. It will show how museum rejects invite communities and financial stakeholders to preserve outside museum institutions.

Paper long abstract:

Hip heritage: when the locals take it back.

New museums, old collections, and the trajectory of rejections.

This paper is part of a larger research project investigating how economic realities and new public management affect how museums of cultural history organize, manage and develop their operations. The larger project asks, "When the budget is tight, whose heritage counts most?" (Gradén & O'Dell 2019). This paper discusses what happens to objects, collections, and ideas rejected when museums shed their skin and focus on elite consumers and financially resourceful constituencies. Building on fieldwork in the American Pacific Northwest, this paper will show how such museum deaccessions and rejects are far from lost to oblivion. Instead, they engage communities, financial stakeholders, and preservationists outside museum institutions. As our examples will show, objects that a museum finds no longer interesting for the museum's future development can change hands and value (Thompson 2017). In the case we present, members of a local shipyard decide to take more significant pieces of a museum's core exhibition and object, which was no longer anything the museum had a place for and put it on display in new ways.

Gradén & O’Dell 2019. Hip Heritage and Heritage Pasts: Tensions when refashioning institutional culture. In: Karin Ekström (ed) Museum Marketization: Cultural Institutions in the Neoliberal Era. Pages 115-133: London: Routledge.

Thompson, Michael 2017 (1979). Rubbish Theory: the creation and destruction of value. New edition [Second edition] London: Pluto Press