Let Us Now Praise Famous Guitars: Persona and the Material Displays of Popular Music Museums

Authors

  • Charles Fairchild University of Sydney, Australia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/psj2019vol5no1art841

Keywords:

popular music museums, musial celebrity, popular music heritage

Abstract

The study of popular music museums has expanded greatly in the past decade or so. The numerous studies produced so far have largely focused on issues to do with tourism, heritage, and curatorship. Most analysis has attempted to gauge the effectiveness and degree of success of the various methods of constructing and displaying collections of sounds, objects, and ideas. One area that can be of interest in moving beyond these analyses of museum practice is to examine how larger ideologies of artistry and artists that pervade the celebrity personas so assiduously built around famous musicians are an important foundation for these museums’ displays. There are two reasons for the value of this approach. First, it should be clear that most exhibits in popular music museums are built to enhance, not contest already-existing images, historical narratives, and genre-defining attributes that surround well-known musicians. Therefore, it is not possible to understand these institutions without some sense of how they work with musician personas that necessarily precede any presentation in museum exhibitions. Second, we can see this dynamic in extraordinarily concise forms when we examine some of the ‘famous objects’ these museums display. We can often see an entire complex of received ideas about an artist encapsulated in just a few well-known objects they once possessed. From this I will suggest that the personas of famous musicians that appear in most popular music museums do so through varied amalgams of symbolic and material forms meant to stabilise or enhance already-existing ideas about canonically-validated ‘great’ artists.

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Author Biography

  • Charles Fairchild, University of Sydney, Australia

    Charles Fairchild is an Associate Professor of Popular Music at the University of Sydney and the author of Sounds, Screens, and Speakers (Bloomsbury, 2019), Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Music, Radio and the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2012).

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Published

2019-07-11

Issue

Section

Themed Articles

How to Cite

Let Us Now Praise Famous Guitars: Persona and the Material Displays of Popular Music Museums. (2019). Persona Studies, 5(1), 61-74. https://doi.org/10.21153/psj2019vol5no1art841

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