![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2CncYR5:
there should be a special verb that just means going to a museum.
we museéd. we mu-saw. we MuSaw Everything today. It was. It was A Lot.
reviews, mixed; some of my choices about what museums to musee were dictated by the fact that everyone and their fucking mother was out today with all the kids to see every sight and it was a goddamn mob scene all over the national mall.
So there’s family lore about museums, is the thing. my mom’s grad degree was actually in museum curatorship. her first real grown-up jobs were as a museum curator. she’s super into it. when she was home with us wee tykes, what she did for years and years was find out all the local museums we could day-trip to, with special emphasis on the free ones, and take us there. from the time i could walk on my own i knew to put my hands behind my back when looking at artifacts in a museum. we’d run around like hellions in the lobby and the docents would all have heart attacks but once we were in the exhibits our hands were behind our backs and we were reading the labels. we never ever ever touched anything. we were not angels but we Never Touched Anything Ever Ever.
So.
As a teen I volunteered at the NY State Museum. So I knew some of the behind-the-scenes lore. My grandma volunteered there for decades.
Then-Head Curator Craig Williams nearly got into a fistfight with the Smithsonian American History Museum’s curatorial staff after 9/11 at the Fresh Kills Landfill, when the Smithsonian turned up first as soon as the authorities opened the site to museums, and wrenched the doors off the crushed NYFD Engine 6 Pumper. Williams, indignant, made them return the doors, and claimed the entire piece for the New York State museum, furious at the desecration, like they were some kind of amateur souvenir-hunters. He had first claim, and if they were going to act like that he was damn well going to press it. How dare they. [His indignation was extremely genuine, in case my language her sounds flippant; the crew died at their posts manning that engine. How you could just– make off with pieces of it like trophies– ugh.]
Engine 6 Pumper is one of the main features of the NYS 9/11 exhibit, and ties the exhibit thematically to the exhibit around the corner of vintage fire engines from various places in the state. My niece didn’t understand the difference, and kept leading me around and around the two exhibits, not understanding why I kept pausing by Engine 6 Pumper and wiping my eyes. I was 21 when that happened, and watched the buildings collapse, and had my own private collective moment of horrified realization about what had happened to all those firefighters we’d just watched pour into those buildings, along with literally every other human watching in that moment, so.
Anyway.
I’ve gotten Smithsonian magazine for much of my life, and admire the institution’s works in general, but that little anecdote has always stuck in my mind.
So: I wasn’t much impressed with the Natural History Museum. My very favorite museum in the entire world is the AMNH in NYC; I’ve loved it since I was a toddler having her first transcendent experience in their Hall of Dinosaurs. This one suffered firstly from being an absolute mosh pit, and secondly from basically… no signage. You get a map, if you want, but like. There’s no real indication of which way you’re meant to go, but many of the exhibits are clearly designed to be approached from one direction– signs perpendicular to the flow of traffic are literally blank on one side. But it’s so crowded it’s not like you can retreat and go around to attack the exhibit the other way. You just have to go through backward and try to make sense of it anyway. And then like… good fucking luck finding the way up to the next floor… we wound up out an emergency exit in a access stairwell hoping we wouldn’t set an alarm off.
Most of the items on display were casts or replicas, which, okay, fine, I get it, but– the T-Rex skeleton didn’t even say whether it was a cast, a composite, a replica, a conjecture… if you read the whole sign, you could figure out that their real skeleton was off being restored somewhere, but it didn’t say what the thing you were looking at actually was, then. So that was… dissatisfying.
I guess a lot of it’s under construction, so I’ll suspend some judgement. But for the record, there is no mammoth skeleton, woolly or otherwise; the one they had it turned out was a composite of up to 70 individuals from at least 2 different species, so they’ve sent it off for restoration and replaced it with… nothing. They don’t have a mastodon either. I took a picture of a replica of a carved woolly mammoth in the Early Humans Exhibit instead because I had already guessed it was all the mammoth I’d get.
Another thing that was a choice I disliked was that a lot of the exhibits had features at ground level, as if for very small children to look in, which is keen and all, but if you are an adult you literally cannot see the thing. I do not have the mobility in a crowd (while wearing a skirt) as an adult human woman to fucking get down on all fours on the fucking floor to peer into a dark hole to see whether the point of the exhibit is worth looking at or not. (Spoiler alert: often they weren’t, if there was illumination it wasn’t working in many of the cases.) So I was super annoyed. I guess you weren’t supposed to care if you were an adult? Here’s the punchline but grown-ups won’t give a fuck so let’s not make it accessible to them? Dude and I weren’t the only adults there without kids– well, I think, it was hard to tell, because there were children everywhere, but. Still!
AMNH is better, if you’re a real enthusiast it’s probably worth a visit but otherwise, skip it unless you have tiny children and want them to give the plague to other tiny children. (ALSO NO MAMMOTH = BULLSHIT THERE WASN’T EVEN A GIANT GROUND SLOTH OR ANYTHING BOO.)
The other thing that skeeved me out mildly was how much “primitive” art they had in there, like… those are… housebuilders in Mali… they are… humans not animals… I get that the side of the museum says “Museum Of Natural History And Man” but maybe stick to animals and don’t do the weird creepy thing where you designate exotic cultures as basically equivalent to animals??? I am not informed about this in any great detail so that’s as much thought as I gave to it– a vaguely skeeved feeling of ick. BUT, there was a cool exhibit on Narwhals that drew heavily on Inuit knowledge and culture about the whales, and it was cool and well-done and that– see, that made sense, it was about narwhals and the culture that knows the most out of them, and it was beautifully done and respectful, and I really liked that. I got that.
NEXT we went to the museum of American History, largely because it was right there and the line didn’t look that long.
We got in and picked up a map and were like… this doesn’t… say what’s in here. The exhibits’ titles (I went online on my goddamn phone so I could find out what was in this fucking museum, because they sure as shit weren’t going to tell you from inside it!) sounded boring as fuck. “Americans and Stories About Money” was an actual exhibit, I shit you not. Why would I want to look at that??? We wandered totally by accident into an exhibit about the Japanese internment camps that was fabulous, absolutely fabulous, but then it dumped us back out in TV-World, and like, ok, there’s Oscar the Grouch, Bill Nye’s labcoat, Mr. Rogers’ red cardigan, OK, but that was… about it? Like it was listed as an exhibit, but there was no, like, main placard I could find, it was just kind of a hallway.
Oh yeah we saw the Star Spangled Banner too, but. Like. I’ve seen another one just like it from a similar thing and I forgot I hadn’t seen this one. It’s. I mean. It’s cool but it wasn’t like. That amazing. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mindset. Also, you were supposed to go through it one direction but there, again, wasn’t a fucking sign to tell you so and once we got in it was too crowded to turn around so we just had to fucking deal with the exhibit backwards, like basically everything in this godforsaken place. (There was a sign you could see, if you came out the entrance, that had been rotated so as you came out of the entrance you could see that it said entrance, so it was in exactly the most useless place fucking possible. (You couldn’t see it if you were going the right way!) It was extremely poorly designed, and it’s not like that’s a temporary exhibition. That’s a permanent exhibit in a purpose-built space. Pretty pathetic.)
We left rather than reading about American Pioneer Visions or Housewares of the Seventies or whatever. I bet there’s cool shit in there but we were not feeling it. (Apparently they have Julia Child’s kitchen somewhere, but I wasn’t going on a wild goose chase for it.)
Then we went to the National Archives. We saw the Magna Carta (one of four surviving copies), and an exhibit on the idea of civil rights that moved me to tears in several places– lots of primary source stuff, multimedia, Martin Luther King, naturalization papers, a whole chunk on women’s suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment, super neat. There was also an exhibit about Vietnam that was based on all these primary sources as well, including recordings of telephone calls and things, and it was incredibly powerful. (A handwritten, angry letter from a mother whose son was killed in Vietnam to President Johnson, and his first draft reply with crossings-out and pencil corrections as he tried to figure out what to say in reply. God, it was– a lot. Meanwhile in the background there was audio playing that had been recorded at protests.)
We were going to go into the Rotunda to see, you know, the Constitution, like you do, but having waited in line to enter the building, there was then a second line to get into that room and it looked to be about an hour long, and if we’d done that we couldn’t have done anything else that day, it already being after 4. (We might not even have gotten in before they closed.)
I wanted to zip into the Air and Space museum but there were lines down the block all week apparently, and it was the opposite direction, so, no. It doesn’t mention this anywhere at all, but methinks this holiday week is one of the peak times for the museums. Their normal peak is over the summer, but today literally everyone was there, like every single person on Earth (hi were you there? probably? sorry I didn’t see you among the other seven billion people), and I fail to see how it’s possible that they’re busier in the summer. So, no dice.
Instead we went down to the National Portrait Gallery, where we looked at a really powerful exhibit on portraits of soldiers– including one haunting project that was just the photos of KIA soldiers’ bedrooms. They’re mostly so young that those bedrooms were invariably in their parents’ houses, set up as kind of shrines to the truncated life of the soldier. Teddy bears on the neatly made bed, pin-up girls and high school band posters on the walls, a folded flag on the windowsill in the commemorative case they send them to you in. Really moving.
We also looked at some Notable Early Americans– and that bit was great, a wonderful breadth of representation– Pocahontas, Ben Franklin (the portrait for the $100!), Alexander Hamilton next to John Jay, a number of notable African-Americans whose history I had not yet heard– I mean, all kinds of people, really well-presented.
Then we looked at some notable portraits of the Civil War, which, ok. Hey, Stonewall Jackson, you’re a nutso and you look it. And a neat-o selection of Matthew Brady’s studio’s carte-de-visite portraits of notable personages, like P.T. Barnum and suchlike. Enjoyable.
We took a little cruise through Recent Acquisitions, which were fascinating, and then zipped over into the American Art Museum half of the building to see some folk art. There was a phenomenal– thing, I don’t know how to describe it, it was a room-sized installation of a kind of… setting? for the second coming of Christ? that this African-American man made in a rented garage over the course of 14 years in the 50s and 60s according to a series of ecstatic visions he had? It was like, furniture and light bulbs and things wrapped in gold and silver foil, with a big motto above that said “FEAR NOT”, and it was just… incredible. I sort of got a photo but not really.
Anyway. It was– a whole room, on risers kind of, I can’t explain it. Holy shit. It was incredible.
By this point we were exhausted, so we dragged ourselves back to the hotel. There’s a bunch more stuff I meant to see, but. That’s gotta be it; we’re out of here tomorrow.
One last observation: there was literally no concession that I could see to people who did not read English. I did glimpse a booklet with Braille interpretations of one exhibit, but I don’t recall which exhibit it was, and it was the only one I saw. There were some tour guides, but I never saw or heard one that wasn’t speaking English. If you’re not fluent in written English, and you come to a Smithsonian museum, well, fuck you, apparently. I thought that was an odd little side note. Most museums elsewhere in the world have at least occasional captions in other languages, or like, an audio tour or something. The Portrait Gallery had dual English-Spanish captions on the recent acquisitions and the soldiers’ portrait exhibits, and that was the entire sum total of any kind of non-English interpretation of any exhibit I saw in any place this entire time. It’s possible there were other-language booklets at the information desks but while I was surrounded by people speaking other languages the entire time, I never saw anyone consulting any booklet other than the very basic (and in English) map booklets. So… I dunno! It struck me as weird but I don’t know if it is. (The New York State Museum’s captions are likewise only in English, I think, so it’s not unheard-of here, I’m sure.)
So– a lot of museuming, and I got a lot out of it, but I had some quibbles, I guess, and there they are, because I am tired and petty, LOL.
(Your picture was not posted)
there should be a special verb that just means going to a museum.
we museéd. we mu-saw. we MuSaw Everything today. It was. It was A Lot.
reviews, mixed; some of my choices about what museums to musee were dictated by the fact that everyone and their fucking mother was out today with all the kids to see every sight and it was a goddamn mob scene all over the national mall.
So there’s family lore about museums, is the thing. my mom’s grad degree was actually in museum curatorship. her first real grown-up jobs were as a museum curator. she’s super into it. when she was home with us wee tykes, what she did for years and years was find out all the local museums we could day-trip to, with special emphasis on the free ones, and take us there. from the time i could walk on my own i knew to put my hands behind my back when looking at artifacts in a museum. we’d run around like hellions in the lobby and the docents would all have heart attacks but once we were in the exhibits our hands were behind our backs and we were reading the labels. we never ever ever touched anything. we were not angels but we Never Touched Anything Ever Ever.
So.
As a teen I volunteered at the NY State Museum. So I knew some of the behind-the-scenes lore. My grandma volunteered there for decades.
Then-Head Curator Craig Williams nearly got into a fistfight with the Smithsonian American History Museum’s curatorial staff after 9/11 at the Fresh Kills Landfill, when the Smithsonian turned up first as soon as the authorities opened the site to museums, and wrenched the doors off the crushed NYFD Engine 6 Pumper. Williams, indignant, made them return the doors, and claimed the entire piece for the New York State museum, furious at the desecration, like they were some kind of amateur souvenir-hunters. He had first claim, and if they were going to act like that he was damn well going to press it. How dare they. [His indignation was extremely genuine, in case my language her sounds flippant; the crew died at their posts manning that engine. How you could just– make off with pieces of it like trophies– ugh.]
Engine 6 Pumper is one of the main features of the NYS 9/11 exhibit, and ties the exhibit thematically to the exhibit around the corner of vintage fire engines from various places in the state. My niece didn’t understand the difference, and kept leading me around and around the two exhibits, not understanding why I kept pausing by Engine 6 Pumper and wiping my eyes. I was 21 when that happened, and watched the buildings collapse, and had my own private collective moment of horrified realization about what had happened to all those firefighters we’d just watched pour into those buildings, along with literally every other human watching in that moment, so.
Anyway.
I’ve gotten Smithsonian magazine for much of my life, and admire the institution’s works in general, but that little anecdote has always stuck in my mind.
So: I wasn’t much impressed with the Natural History Museum. My very favorite museum in the entire world is the AMNH in NYC; I’ve loved it since I was a toddler having her first transcendent experience in their Hall of Dinosaurs. This one suffered firstly from being an absolute mosh pit, and secondly from basically… no signage. You get a map, if you want, but like. There’s no real indication of which way you’re meant to go, but many of the exhibits are clearly designed to be approached from one direction– signs perpendicular to the flow of traffic are literally blank on one side. But it’s so crowded it’s not like you can retreat and go around to attack the exhibit the other way. You just have to go through backward and try to make sense of it anyway. And then like… good fucking luck finding the way up to the next floor… we wound up out an emergency exit in a access stairwell hoping we wouldn’t set an alarm off.
Most of the items on display were casts or replicas, which, okay, fine, I get it, but– the T-Rex skeleton didn’t even say whether it was a cast, a composite, a replica, a conjecture… if you read the whole sign, you could figure out that their real skeleton was off being restored somewhere, but it didn’t say what the thing you were looking at actually was, then. So that was… dissatisfying.
I guess a lot of it’s under construction, so I’ll suspend some judgement. But for the record, there is no mammoth skeleton, woolly or otherwise; the one they had it turned out was a composite of up to 70 individuals from at least 2 different species, so they’ve sent it off for restoration and replaced it with… nothing. They don’t have a mastodon either. I took a picture of a replica of a carved woolly mammoth in the Early Humans Exhibit instead because I had already guessed it was all the mammoth I’d get.
Another thing that was a choice I disliked was that a lot of the exhibits had features at ground level, as if for very small children to look in, which is keen and all, but if you are an adult you literally cannot see the thing. I do not have the mobility in a crowd (while wearing a skirt) as an adult human woman to fucking get down on all fours on the fucking floor to peer into a dark hole to see whether the point of the exhibit is worth looking at or not. (Spoiler alert: often they weren’t, if there was illumination it wasn’t working in many of the cases.) So I was super annoyed. I guess you weren’t supposed to care if you were an adult? Here’s the punchline but grown-ups won’t give a fuck so let’s not make it accessible to them? Dude and I weren’t the only adults there without kids– well, I think, it was hard to tell, because there were children everywhere, but. Still!
AMNH is better, if you’re a real enthusiast it’s probably worth a visit but otherwise, skip it unless you have tiny children and want them to give the plague to other tiny children. (ALSO NO MAMMOTH = BULLSHIT THERE WASN’T EVEN A GIANT GROUND SLOTH OR ANYTHING BOO.)
The other thing that skeeved me out mildly was how much “primitive” art they had in there, like… those are… housebuilders in Mali… they are… humans not animals… I get that the side of the museum says “Museum Of Natural History And Man” but maybe stick to animals and don’t do the weird creepy thing where you designate exotic cultures as basically equivalent to animals??? I am not informed about this in any great detail so that’s as much thought as I gave to it– a vaguely skeeved feeling of ick. BUT, there was a cool exhibit on Narwhals that drew heavily on Inuit knowledge and culture about the whales, and it was cool and well-done and that– see, that made sense, it was about narwhals and the culture that knows the most out of them, and it was beautifully done and respectful, and I really liked that. I got that.
NEXT we went to the museum of American History, largely because it was right there and the line didn’t look that long.
We got in and picked up a map and were like… this doesn’t… say what’s in here. The exhibits’ titles (I went online on my goddamn phone so I could find out what was in this fucking museum, because they sure as shit weren’t going to tell you from inside it!) sounded boring as fuck. “Americans and Stories About Money” was an actual exhibit, I shit you not. Why would I want to look at that??? We wandered totally by accident into an exhibit about the Japanese internment camps that was fabulous, absolutely fabulous, but then it dumped us back out in TV-World, and like, ok, there’s Oscar the Grouch, Bill Nye’s labcoat, Mr. Rogers’ red cardigan, OK, but that was… about it? Like it was listed as an exhibit, but there was no, like, main placard I could find, it was just kind of a hallway.
Oh yeah we saw the Star Spangled Banner too, but. Like. I’ve seen another one just like it from a similar thing and I forgot I hadn’t seen this one. It’s. I mean. It’s cool but it wasn’t like. That amazing. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mindset. Also, you were supposed to go through it one direction but there, again, wasn’t a fucking sign to tell you so and once we got in it was too crowded to turn around so we just had to fucking deal with the exhibit backwards, like basically everything in this godforsaken place. (There was a sign you could see, if you came out the entrance, that had been rotated so as you came out of the entrance you could see that it said entrance, so it was in exactly the most useless place fucking possible. (You couldn’t see it if you were going the right way!) It was extremely poorly designed, and it’s not like that’s a temporary exhibition. That’s a permanent exhibit in a purpose-built space. Pretty pathetic.)
We left rather than reading about American Pioneer Visions or Housewares of the Seventies or whatever. I bet there’s cool shit in there but we were not feeling it. (Apparently they have Julia Child’s kitchen somewhere, but I wasn’t going on a wild goose chase for it.)
Then we went to the National Archives. We saw the Magna Carta (one of four surviving copies), and an exhibit on the idea of civil rights that moved me to tears in several places– lots of primary source stuff, multimedia, Martin Luther King, naturalization papers, a whole chunk on women’s suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment, super neat. There was also an exhibit about Vietnam that was based on all these primary sources as well, including recordings of telephone calls and things, and it was incredibly powerful. (A handwritten, angry letter from a mother whose son was killed in Vietnam to President Johnson, and his first draft reply with crossings-out and pencil corrections as he tried to figure out what to say in reply. God, it was– a lot. Meanwhile in the background there was audio playing that had been recorded at protests.)
We were going to go into the Rotunda to see, you know, the Constitution, like you do, but having waited in line to enter the building, there was then a second line to get into that room and it looked to be about an hour long, and if we’d done that we couldn’t have done anything else that day, it already being after 4. (We might not even have gotten in before they closed.)
I wanted to zip into the Air and Space museum but there were lines down the block all week apparently, and it was the opposite direction, so, no. It doesn’t mention this anywhere at all, but methinks this holiday week is one of the peak times for the museums. Their normal peak is over the summer, but today literally everyone was there, like every single person on Earth (hi were you there? probably? sorry I didn’t see you among the other seven billion people), and I fail to see how it’s possible that they’re busier in the summer. So, no dice.
Instead we went down to the National Portrait Gallery, where we looked at a really powerful exhibit on portraits of soldiers– including one haunting project that was just the photos of KIA soldiers’ bedrooms. They’re mostly so young that those bedrooms were invariably in their parents’ houses, set up as kind of shrines to the truncated life of the soldier. Teddy bears on the neatly made bed, pin-up girls and high school band posters on the walls, a folded flag on the windowsill in the commemorative case they send them to you in. Really moving.
We also looked at some Notable Early Americans– and that bit was great, a wonderful breadth of representation– Pocahontas, Ben Franklin (the portrait for the $100!), Alexander Hamilton next to John Jay, a number of notable African-Americans whose history I had not yet heard– I mean, all kinds of people, really well-presented.
Then we looked at some notable portraits of the Civil War, which, ok. Hey, Stonewall Jackson, you’re a nutso and you look it. And a neat-o selection of Matthew Brady’s studio’s carte-de-visite portraits of notable personages, like P.T. Barnum and suchlike. Enjoyable.
We took a little cruise through Recent Acquisitions, which were fascinating, and then zipped over into the American Art Museum half of the building to see some folk art. There was a phenomenal– thing, I don’t know how to describe it, it was a room-sized installation of a kind of… setting? for the second coming of Christ? that this African-American man made in a rented garage over the course of 14 years in the 50s and 60s according to a series of ecstatic visions he had? It was like, furniture and light bulbs and things wrapped in gold and silver foil, with a big motto above that said “FEAR NOT”, and it was just… incredible. I sort of got a photo but not really.
Anyway. It was– a whole room, on risers kind of, I can’t explain it. Holy shit. It was incredible.
By this point we were exhausted, so we dragged ourselves back to the hotel. There’s a bunch more stuff I meant to see, but. That’s gotta be it; we’re out of here tomorrow.
One last observation: there was literally no concession that I could see to people who did not read English. I did glimpse a booklet with Braille interpretations of one exhibit, but I don’t recall which exhibit it was, and it was the only one I saw. There were some tour guides, but I never saw or heard one that wasn’t speaking English. If you’re not fluent in written English, and you come to a Smithsonian museum, well, fuck you, apparently. I thought that was an odd little side note. Most museums elsewhere in the world have at least occasional captions in other languages, or like, an audio tour or something. The Portrait Gallery had dual English-Spanish captions on the recent acquisitions and the soldiers’ portrait exhibits, and that was the entire sum total of any kind of non-English interpretation of any exhibit I saw in any place this entire time. It’s possible there were other-language booklets at the information desks but while I was surrounded by people speaking other languages the entire time, I never saw anyone consulting any booklet other than the very basic (and in English) map booklets. So… I dunno! It struck me as weird but I don’t know if it is. (The New York State Museum’s captions are likewise only in English, I think, so it’s not unheard-of here, I’m sure.)
So– a lot of museuming, and I got a lot out of it, but I had some quibbles, I guess, and there they are, because I am tired and petty, LOL.
(Your picture was not posted)
