Description: "Traditionally sight has been the only sense with a ticket to enter the museum. The same is true of histories of art, in which artworks are often presented as purely visual objects. The Museum of the Senses offers a sensory history of art and collections, revealing how people used to handle, smell and even taste artworks and artefacts. Topics range from the tactile power of relics to the sensuous allure of cabinets of curiosities, and from the feel of a Rembrandt to the scent of Monet's garden. The book concludes with a discussion of how contemporary museums are stimulating the senses through interactive and multimedia displays. Constance Classen, a leading authority on the cultural history of the senses, has produced a fascinating study of sensual and emotional responses to artefacts from the middle ages to the present. The Museum of the Senses is an important read for anyone interested in the history of art as well as for students and researchers in cultural studies and museum studies"--
Brief description: Constance Classen is Visiting Scholar at McGill University, Canada and director of an interdisciplinary project on art, museums, and the senses. She is the editor of The Book of Touch (Berg, 2005), and the author of, among other works, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (1993) and The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination (1998), as well as The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (2012).
Review Quotes: Read The Museum of the Senses before you next venture into a gallery or museum and you'll understand the art anew. This is a fabulous study by an exceptionally talented historian.
Mark M. Smith, University of South Carolina, USA