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Curating popular music: authority and history, aesthetics and technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2014

Chris Atton
Chris Atton*
Affiliation:
School of Arts and Creative Industries, Edinburgh Napier University, Merchiston Campus, Edinburgh EH10 5DT, UK E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The practice of curation in popular music may be seen as a form of historical enquiry that works in a similar way to the critical projects of the ‘new museology’. Self-curation can be employed by musicians to re-present their work as a historiographical project of popular music and as an intervention in dominant critical accounts of the musicians' creative practices. The challenge to conventional historiography can be understood as a project of archaeology in the Foucauldian sense, where discourses surrounding objects and their histories may be contested and reinvigorated through a process of recollecting/re-collecting that also recalls Walter Benjamin's challenge to historicism. Using the work of Robert Fripp and King Crimson as an example of musician-curated recordings, I argue that legal and economic control may become a basis for aesthetic control, through which histories of creativity may be rewritten. The act of recollection/re-collection becomes a route through which musicians are able to engage with critical contexts and genre formations, and to contribute actively to the material culture of their own history.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , October 2014 , pp. 413 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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