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The discursive turn in heritage studies has made major contributions to our understanding of heritage as a set of processual practices, demonstrating how they are inherently contingent while acknowledging their role in the legitimation of specific relationships of power. More recently, there has been a related interest in the rhetorical uses of heritage, and the paper builds on these debates to explore the ways in which the National Gallery (London) mobilised a rhetoric about access as part of its scheme of post-WWII reconstruction. The popular 'Exhibition of Cleaned Pictures' (1947) sheds light on the rhetorical devices employed by the Gallery. These were a cogent example of the Gallery's intended programme of emancipatory viewership, premised on visitors' the right to look, but simultaneously reinforced the Gallery's authoritative discourses. The paper shows how photography's reportedly unbiased language became embedded in the Gallery's democratising agenda and helped shape distinctive forms of publicness which fostered a consensual view about the Gallery's practice of cleaning. Rather than seeing both episodes as mutually exclusive, the paper investigates the internal logic of democratisation and professionalisation as a series of co-dependent rhetorical operations that simultaneously enabled freedom and coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developments in the digital field have introduced new opportunities not only for museums to engage with their visitors, but also for researchers to learn about visitors' experiences through their online behaviour. This article discusses how the mediation and perception of exhibited photographs in museums can be researched through an analysis of Instagram posts, using text-mining methods. A case study examining the World Press Photo 20 exhibition at the WestLicht museum in Vienna was used to explore three different framings of the World Press photos: first, how the photographs were initially used within newspaper articles as a news source; second, how the museum communicated the exhibited photos on social media; and third, how visitors reflected on the exhibition and the museum visit on Instagram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]