Item Details

No two houses of the holy: Creating cultural heritage in Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses

Issue: Vol 10 No. 2 (2015)

Journal: Popular Music History

Subject Areas: Popular Music

DOI: 10.1558/pomh.33411

Abstract:

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.

Author: Kathleen Pirrie Adams

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