While the legacy of the Great Exhibition of 1851 as the starting point of world exhibitions and for the development of South Kensington’s museum district is well understood, less attention has been paid to its third offshoot: the attempt to create a more permanent way of showcasing the world in a second Crystal Palace. On the basis of recent scholarship, this contribution discusses its economic and conceptual basis, and the reasons for its temporary success and ultimate decline.

From May 7 to October 9, 1892, an international exhibition washeld in Vienna, the aim of which was to present the evolution of theater and music, from their origins and through each country. Focusing on the musical aspect of the event, this article examines the contradiction between the organizers’ initial idea and the final result. Analysis centers on the historical context that necessitated the setting up of a new event and its consequences for the event’s organization. This observation will then lead us to a study of the methodology used and the resulting hierarchy, even though the initial project aimed to avoid competition and conflict. With a focus on the ethnographic aspect of the Rotonde and the place given to the operetta, we will finally question the valuations and exclusions brought to light by the exhibition and ask if the event generated the “symphony of cultures” initially hoped for.

The dimensions of the giant globes built in the second half of the ninetheenth century quickly make us forget that they are paradigmatic cases of miniaturized worlds. This article focuses on Élisée Reclus’ project for the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900. A relief globe of about 127 meters in diameter was to be housed in an even bigger globe. The Grand globe could thus be considered as a prefiguration of the “world interior” [“Weltinnenraum”], a term Rainer Maria Rilke used in one of his poems a few years later. The theatrical staging of a globe within a globe combines aesthetic and affective, pedagogical and political objectives. However, this article is less about the politics and convictions of Reclus than about the relationship of his project to cartographic practices and “world views” at the time. What is it that distinguishes the Grand globe from other world models, from competing exhibits and views at the Paris exhibition? And what does the inward turn of geographic representation tell us about the “world” around 1900?

As places of recreation and pleasure for the urban bourgeoisie, botanical gardens in the late nineteenth century staged elaborately designed landscape imaginaries of primordiality and wilderness. Far more than museums, these exhibition sites aimed at sensual and physical experience – with their specific types of planting, spectacular scenery and glass architecture. Unlike academic collections they did not work with a systematic display, but with scenographic visual and auditory means. In recent years, artists and curators have focused on the illusionary spaces of botanical gardens. Colonial involvements or the display of plants that are considered exotic have become the starting point of artistic deconstruction, as well as the hierarchization of creatures and species.

Often located in places difficult to access – caves, rock shelters, and deserts – prehistoric paintings and engravings were first generally known to the wider public in the 1930s through reproductions presented in publications and exhibitions in major European and American cities. The German anthropologist Leo Frobenius (1873–1938) played a decisive role in this diffusion by creating the world’s largest collection of prehistoric art facsimiles: about 5,000 so-called “original” copies faithfully reproducing the size, shapes, and colors of the paintings. The copies were made throughout the world primarily by professionally trained young women artists who accompanied Frobenius on his expeditions. These watercolors brought these rarely seen and distant images into the larger world. In numerous exhibitions, rock art – converted into two dimensions, in rectangular form, and hangable on a wall – was presented to the public like recognized masterpieces. This article explores the history of the collection and today’s exhibition concepts.

The article examines a rhetoric employed by some modern art collections from the beginning of the twentieth century until the late 1950s that drastically expanded the concept of modernism in time and space. Enabled by imperial and colonial access to a multitude of artifacts, contemporary Western works were arranged with works from other epochs and continents in long genealogies, often spanning several thousand years, insisting on a shared “kinship” or “timelessness”. The focus lies on two historical moments when such comparative displays were attempted: the German Weimar Republic with the newly opened Museum Folkwang in Essen (1922–1933), and the early post-war United States, with the anniversary exhibition Timeless Aspects of Modern Art (1948) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the traveling show 4000 Years of Modern Art (1953/56) at the Walters Art Gallery and the Baltimore Museum of Art. To what extent do these projects echo the premises of a supposedly universal “world art”, as developed from 1900 onwards by an increasingly anthropologically oriented art history and in popular albums?

In 1927, the city of Frankfurt am Main in Germany organized an exhibition about music. Among the visitors was the sociologist Theodor Adorno who takes a critical look at what he considers to be an “encyclopedia for the eye” intended for an audience that does nothing but passively contemplate. Adorno highlights evidence that art is no longer defined in terms of its auratic aspect, which mobilizes a historical and social context, but of its unique immediate presence. Adorno’s observations are thus a prelude to the critical construction of the sociological theory of exhibition value, which postulates the goal of commercializing visibility. This work will determine to what extent the exhibition is the result of advertising promotion which contributes to the commodification for a public and to the intensification of the lived experience in a logic of entertainment.

Using the example of the exhibition Capturing Iran’s Past, which was displayed in the Museum of Islamic Arts in Berlin, in 2019, I discuss problems that arise when contemporary art is exhibited in historical museums. By drawing on critical curatorial theory, analysis of exhibitions, and my own reflections as a co-curator of Capturing Iran’s Past, I argue that these problems are grounded in the ignorance of contemporary art museums toward artists who are operating outside the geographical canon. Therefore, works of artists who are not based in Europe/North-America are often presented in ethnographic or Islamic museums, which work primarily with historical artifacts rather than contemporary art. However, these museums are practicing curatorial activism by providing space for these very artists.