Drawing upon a career in studying museum visitors, renowned researcher John Falk attempts to create a predictive model of visitor experience, one that can help museum professionals better meet those visitors’ needs.

With its fittingly dramatic design, Courbet and the Modern Landscape accompanies the first major museum exhibition specifically to address Gustave Courbet's extraordinary achievement in landscape painting. Many of these carefully selected works produced from 1855 to 1876--gathered from Asia, Europe, and North America--will be new to readers. The catalogue--which accompanies an exhibition at the Getty Museum to be held from February 21 to May 14, 2006--highlights the artist's expressive responses to the natural environment. Essays by the curators examine Courbet's distinctly modern practice of landscape painting. Mary Morton's essay situates his landscapes in relation to his work in other genres, his critical reputation, and his role in establishing a new pictorial language for landscape painting. Charlotte Eyerman's essay investigates how later generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists responded to Courbet's example. The catalogue also includes an essay by Dominique de Font-Reaulx, curator of photographs at the Musee d'Orsay, on the relationship between Courbet's work and landscape photography of the 1850s and 1860s. With its fittingly dramatic design, Courbet and the Modern Landscape accompanies the first major museum exhibition specifically to address Gustave Courbet's extraordinary achievement in landscape painting. Many of these carefully selected works produced from 1855 to 1876--gathered from Asia, Europe, and North America--will be new to readers. The catalogue--which accompanies an exhibition at the Getty Museum to be held from February 21 to May 14, 2006--highlights the artist's expressive responses to the natural environment. Essays by the curators examine Courbet's distinctly modern practice of landscape painting. Mary Morton's essay situates his landscapes in relation to his work in other genres, his critical reputation, and his role in establishing a new pictorial language for landscape painting. Charlotte Eyerman's essay investigates how later generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists responded to Courbet's example. The catalogue also includes an essay by Dominique de Font-Reaulx, curator of photographs at the Musee d'Orsay, on the relationship between Courbet's work and landscape photography of the 1850s and 1860s.

Many times, ordinary happenings in our lives serve to beautifully illustrate and reveal Gods truths to us. Jesus set the example by using everyday happenings (parables) to illustrate the truths in all His teachings. And if we simply keep our eyes open, we could observe that God is still teaching us in the same manner. We could also be aware that even many well known Scriptures may contain beautiful truths that are often overlooked by the casual student. In this study, a lifelong Bible teacher with an unusual passion for searching out these little hidden lessons, not only by observing and applying everyday happenings to illustrate the meanings of various Scriptures, but also looking at several familiar Scriptures through different lenses in an effort to find additional truths. Herein, he shares some of these little hidden treasures with us.

For quite some time now, ethnographic museums in Europe have been compelled to legitimate themselves. Their exhibition-making has become a topic of discussion, as has the contentious history of their collections, which have come about through colonial appropriation. Clearly, this cannot continue. That the situation can be different is something that Clémentine Deliss explores in her current publication. She offers an intriguing mix of autobiographically-informed novel and conceptual thesis on contemporary art and anthropology. Reflections on her own work while she was Director of Frankfurt's Weltkulturen Museum (Museum of World Cultures) are interwoven with the explorations of influential filmmakers, artists and writers. She introduces the Metabolic Museum as an interventionist laboratory for remediating ethnographic collections for future generations. CLÉMENTINE DELISS has achieved international renown as a curator, cultural historian and publisher of artist's books. In her role as Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, as a curator, and as a professor and researcher at eminent institutes and academies, she focuses on transdisciplinary and transcultural exchanges. She is Associate Curator of KW Berlin and Guest Professor at the Academy of Arts, Hamburg.

For lovers of vintage clothing, British supermodel and vintage fashion muse Kate Moss unveils a personally curated selection of her favorite couture and costume pieces from the Museo de la Moda, the world-class fashion museum in Santiago, Chile. International fashion icon Kate Moss and the premier South American fashion museum Museo de la Moda meet in this undeniably stylish volume that celebrates iconic vintage fashion moments throughout history. The Museo de la Moda, founded in 1999, opened in 2007, and directed by Chile's first textile industry scion Jorge Yarur Bascuñán, is one of the world's most important but least-known museums of its kind, housing exquisite garments from nineteenth-century Dolman shawls to twenty-first-century sequin dresses by Balmain. Edited by Kate Moss with text contributions from fashion curator Lydia Kamitsis, this volume features a stylish selection of one hundred archival pieces from the museum, each charting different fashion trends that have inspired Moss's personal sartorial style. Organized by fashion theme, from 1920s opera coats to 1960s Swinging London designs, but also including iconic pieces of pop culture, such as Marilyn Monroe's black dresses and Jimi Hendrix's Indian tunics, each chapter showcases new images of the museum garments as selected by Moss, accompanied by interesting anecdotes and street-style photography documenting Moss wearing that particular fashion trend. This is a chic volume that will appeal to Moss's global following and readers passionate about style, fashion history, design, and culture.

In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la República, Taussig's museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's wealth for almost four hundred years. Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine. This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories.

This collection of writings by Gunther Schuller--the first composer to be awarded the Elise L. Stoeger Composer's Chair of the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center--provides a marvelous introduction to the man and his extraordinary range of musical experience, taste, and learning. In Part I, "Jazz and the Third Stream," Schuller offers his reflections on jazz, insightful pieces on such figures as Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, and Sonny Rollins, and several essays on "the third stream," the genre where jazz and classical music intersect. Part II, "Music Performance and Contemporary Music," includes articles on the art of conducting, the future of opera, the question of a new classicism, and Schuller's own thoughts on his controversial opera The Visitation. The final section, "Music Aesthetics and Education," presents Schuller's reflections on such matters as form, structure, and symbol in music; the need for broadening the audience for quality music; and his vision of the ideal conservatory and the total musician.

In the summer of 1970, 18-year-old Travis Monday joined the U.S. Army and volunteered for Airborne School and for Vietnam. Thirty-five years later he wrote his own story -- Nineteen Jumps and a Prayer. His adventures as an Army paratrooper and as a Vietnam veteran also serve as a platform for telling the stories of others -- including other war veterans. And they enable him to explain how he overcame Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) through faith in God.