This chapter focuses on the everyday. It considers how responsibility for the everyday, quotidian care of cultural heritage is assumed or allocated and the form that this takes. It analyses how care is translated into access, preservation and care of collections and places and how risk is managed when access has the potential to harm the long-term future of cultural heritage. This chapter analyses the ways in which access and preservation are supported, through financial support as well as in statutory provisions; it analyses the duties of care placed on custodians of cultural heritage and the role played by standard-setting.

This chapter focuses on exhibitions of comics history curated by contemporary cartoonists. It maps out the stakes of this curatorial gesture in a context of comics museification and the narrative, aesthetic, and cultural challenges that it raises. Drafting in cartoonists as curators has been a way for some museums to navigate these issues, by commissioning a “cartoonist’s eye” to select and present material from archives. Two specific cartoonist-curated exhibitions are central case studies for this chapter: Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman in 2012 and Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History in 2014. The exhibitions frame “their” histories in quite specific ways, relative to their material and institutional contexts. Both cases present visitors with completely different versions of comics history, based not only on the material that is exhibited but on how it is presented, framed, and organized. Based on interviews and archival research, the chapter offers an in-depth analysis of the layout strategies and museological discourses around the two exhibitions, describing how curating shapes a particular visual transmission of comics history.

Conspicuous consumption and display were central to the Residents’ representational strategies at court. Britons in India are often assumed to have dismissed gift-giving as mere bribery and regarded regal pageantry as empty spectacle; in fact, the opposite is true. Residents were very aware of the symbolism of gifts and their efficacy at securing relationships both vertically and horizontally; this awareness is clearly manifest in their efforts to monitor and regulate these exchanges at court. The attempt on the part of the Company to impose a rigid, contractual framework on gift-giving was therefore not a sign of ignorance or disregard, nor was it simply an attempt to preclude corruption at court. By situating these debates within wider disagreements about the Residents’ expense claims, it becomes clear that there were other, more abstract issues at stake. These squabbles about money were a product of ambivalent attitudes about conspicuous consumption and display and reflect serious differences of opinion regarding the basis of the Company’s legitimacy in India.

This chapter is principally concerned with the relationship between central and local power in Byzantium. It focuses on the resources and structures characterising political elite membership, particularly land, public offices and salaries, kinship, networks, status and display. From a mainly provincial perspective, it examines changes over time in the possessions and political horizons of elites, taking note of the roles of monasteries, villages and commerce. Considerable attention is paid to the polycentric Byzantine world of the later period, which continued until, and in some cases beyond, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and involved polities beyond the Palaiologan dynasty. While much about Byzantine political practice changed between 700 and 1500, the post-1204 evidence reveals the long-term importance of the local to power in Byzantium, a state of affairs often hinted at in earlier periods but only rarely visible in the surviving sources.

This chapter offers an overview of significant surrealist treatments of fashion and style, focusing in particular on the design work of Elsa Schiaparelli as well as on Salvador Dalí’s designs for fabrics, accessories, and department store windows. The chapter examines fashion as a site for the popular translation of surrealist tropes, through advertising, print media, and retail display, and suggests that the precarious cultural positioning of fashion as both art and commerce was deeply related to the long-standing critique of surrealism’s commodification. It further argues that foregrounding fashion in the surrealist archive has implications for understanding the role of women and femininity in surrealism. The visual ubiquity of surrealist tropes in the interwar and the early post–Second World War period ensured that women’s bodies were positioned as expressive agents in close proximity to surrealist tropes, though it thus bound women closely with the movement’s commodification.

This chapter examines Surrealist curatorial practice from its emergence in the 1920s until the last group exhibition prior to André Breton’s death in 1966. Rooted in the agitational French and German Dada demonstrations that immediately preceded them, Surrealist exhibitions aimed to transform their viewers through an evolving set of tactics that diverged markedly from normative gallery display practices. The chapter proposes that by recourse initially to the discursive, then to the tactile, and finally through fully immersive environments, these complex and often elaborate installations aimed to cultivate sensual, politicized, and postnational subjects. Eschewing those detached models of modernism that aimed either to privilege abstraction or to maintain medium specificity, the exhibitions curated by the Surrealists over half a century give shape to a coherent curatorial practice that engaged with some of the hallmark discourses and experiences of the twentieth century.

Chapter 4 treats the genre of the epigraphic inventory within the context of earlier Greek literature. It argues through detailed re-examination of these enigmatic texts that they are calculated in their layout and design to “display” and “replace” the dedications in their store for the viewers of the text. Moreover, whether or not they serve as ongoing useful records for the officials involved, they allow both the polis administration and the public to grapple with multiple forms of deterioration and loss.

This chapter is centred on what was widely seen as the sale of the nineteenth century- the 1893 dispersal of the Spitzer collections. Austrian-born Frédéric Spitzer in many ways was the inheritor of the salvage crusade begun in earlier generations, building up a brilliant array of medieval and Renaissance artefacts (including some faked and composite pieces created on his commission). This chapter explores the visibility of Spitzer in French print culture in order to interrogate the claims for private collectors as patriots, and the attempt by the Third Republic to make collectors into auxiliaries of national policy. The scandal surrounding his sale exposes the anxieties about the interplay of private interest and public institutions, the sensitivity about curators like Émile Molinier when they operated in the market, as well as the virulence of anti-Semitic hostility to Jewish dealers. Most pervasive was the wider fear that French heritage was increasingly snapped up and repatriated by foreign buyers, so that the 1893 sale could be alternately depicted as a triumph, a swindle or a defeat for French culture.

Chapter 2 notes the available sources for exploring kinship and marriage in ancient Egypt in the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom. Decoding modes of display is necessary to discover what monumental sources can reveal about relationships.

In order to assess a possible change in monumental display of social groups from the First Intermediate Period to the Middle Kingdom, the sites of Naga ed-Deir and Abydos are taken as case studies for each of those periods respectively. These sites show that stelae were often grouped into clusters in either tombs or memorial chapels, both sharing a commemorative purpose.

Chapter 2 illustrates the importance of a group approach for stelae in order to extract relevant information about emic constructions of the social fabric. In particular, an alleged clear-cut differentiation between funerary and commemorative stelae is questioned, as these monuments were always mediated through memorial practices. In addition, the articulation of iconographic and inscriptional evidence is shown to provide a more complete assessment of stelae; for example, formulaic phrases often add references to collateral relatives who are not represented iconographically on stelae.

Chapter 4 presents kin group as an etic category that we can use to study ancient Egyptian relatedness. Kin group can be categorised as a polythetic class with a number of concurring attributes, not necessarily existing simultaneously. The six attributes that the primary sources reveal for kin groups in ancient Egypt are that they all live in the same household or area; they are displayed and commemorated together on monuments; they can function as and economic units or corporate groups; they are under the authority of one man who acts as the head of the group; they are buried together or close to each other in the same area of the necropolis; and they hold reciprocal duties with living and deceased members of the group.

This definition of kin groups is thus flexible and purely performative, as it based on what a kin group does rather than on what it is supposed to be. The main attribute is arguably display and commemoration, because most of the sources tend to be monumental in nature, representing an idea of the group that Egyptian themselves were trying to transmit to their contemporary and future audiences.

Chaucer lived in a society that was aware of childhood and adolescence as distinctive stages of human life and which inherited practices whereby young people were brought up and trained for adulthood. Informally, at home, children were introduced to social norms, religion and work. Those from wealthier families underwent more formal education, mastering literacy at home, in schools or in great households, where they learnt reading, rules of courtesy, French and, in the case of some boys, Latin. Chaucer’s works refer in passing to most of these processes, with particular attention to adolescents, including university scholars. During the fifteenth century his works in general came to be seen as having educational value. The Astrolabe, first written for his son Lewis, seems to have been used for teaching reading to other young children while his major writings were recommended as suitable literature for older ones.

Later medieval art is usually discussed in terms of categories like architecture, sculpture, manuscript illumination, stained glass etc. While these categories have historical roots, medieval viewers naturally tended to conflate rather than anatomise what they saw: Chaucer’s testimony to the Court of Chivalry suggests this. Academic taxonomies of art are nevertheless valuable to scholars, even if the terminology of style associated with them is largely modern. Our understanding of later medieval art is clouded by vast material losses, although documents such as the inventories of Pleshy Castle (1397) and the abbot’s chapel at Bury St Edmunds (1429) offer some compensation. These reveal that taste for types of object and imagery was not generally conditioned by social status (e.g. lay or clerical). At the level of the common person, parish churches were major sites of display. Again, documents like the archdeacons’ inventories for the diocese of Norwich (1368) help fill in the gaps created by loss. Sepulchral monuments and architecture enjoy higher rates of survival and thus give a more concrete idea of the look, purpose and function of art.