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Here are the court battles over ownership of pieces, new building materials and the key institutions include the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, British Museum, Tate Modern, the Hermitage, Guggenheim, Smithsonian Institute and Acropolis Museum, the Prado and the Uffizi and galleries in Berlin, Sao Paolo, Manhattan's Whitney Museum designed by Renzo Piano opened in 2014 and hundreds more across the globe together with a selection of artifacts and highlights. A truly glamorous heavyweight Frances Lincoln publication, this spectacular book marries together aspects of architecture, history, photography, art, politics and social interaction at the many hundreds of museums around the world and how they have changed across the years. We take museums for granted. Even if they aren't all free to get into, we assume they will always be there as a bedrock for understanding civilisation. As repositories of human endeavour, knowledge and creativity, the institution of the museum is most like the library, but whereas books are generally read by one person at a time, museums offer a wider possibility of experiencing an object together with friends, family and more broadly as a society. Today museums have fully assimilated media such as photography, film and increasingly digital media and objects yet its status as a 'timeless treasury' as described by Rauschenberg remains as strong as ever. Filled with stunning imagery highlighting the beauty of these venerated buildings, the origins of all the key institutions are revealed as are the motivations of the architects, curators and patrons. The cast of names includes King George II, Napoleon, Henry Clay Frick, Peggy Guggenheim, Andrew Carnegie, Alfred Barr, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Nicholas Serota and Zaha Hadid. A truly magnificent tome, 320pp, 26 x 31.2cm.
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