Posts tagged exhibitions
Imagined Lives at the National Portrait Gallery
From the Telegraph:
Julian Fellowes, Alexander McCall Smith, Tracy Chevalier, Joanna Trollope and Terry Pratchett are among the authors who have created imaginary biographies to accompany the works.
The gallery has a number of paintings which were purchased in the 19th and 20th centuries in the belief that they represented famous people, only for the identities of the sitters to be disproved or disputed.
A painting known as False Mary, painted in 1570 and once thought to be a portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, captured the imagination of McCall Smith. He has written a story identifying her as a body double for the Queen.
For further information from the National Portrait Gallery itself, click here.
Museumsandstuff has questions for you!
As mentioned in the previous post, I’ve whipped up a little poll as an experiment in reader participation. I want to pick your brains about what you like about museums, what really ticks you off and what you would like to see more of.
There are but six very general questions, none of them are compulsory. Fill in what you want, leave what you think is none of my darned business.
And if you feel like it, reblog! If enough people respond, I will write an entry rounding up the results and responding to questions (don’t want to faff around with a questionnaire? There’s an ‘ask me anything’ link on the website, feel free!) and of course, all tips and feedback will be taken on board.
“The exhibition at Auschwitz no longer fulfills its role, as it used to. More or less eight to 10 million people go to such exhibitions around the world today, they cry, they ask why people didn’t react more at the time, why there were so few righteous, then they go home, see genocide on television and don’t move a finger. They don’t ask why they are not righteous themselves.
To me the whole educational system regarding the Holocaust, which really got under way during the 1990s, served its purpose in terms of supplying facts and information. But there is another level of education, a level of awareness about the meaning of those facts. It’s not enough to cry. Empathy is noble, but it’s not enough.”
— PIOTR CYWINSKI, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, where officials are revising exhibitions to better educate visitors, numbers of which reached 1.3 million last year. “If we succeed we will show for the first time the whole array of human choices that people faced at Auschwitz.”
Quoted in “Auschwitz Shifts from Memorializing to Teaching,” by Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times (via tartantambourine)
Exhibition text from the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, SA. From Sociological Images blog here.
Because race is socially constructed, racial classifications change as underlying racial ideologies shift, sometimes opening up opportunities (for instance, allowing groups to be classified as a less stigmatized race) but also often reinforcing racial stratification (such as when the U.S. made the “one-drop” rule, by which you were African American if you had even one Black ancestor, official policy, preventing mixed-race individuals from avoiding the stigma of being Black).
Young, Educated, and Unemployed: A New Generation of Kids Search for Work in their 20s
Via Nerdgasms
What can I say? This is both uplifting and depressing in it’s own ways. Uplifting, because it makes me feel less alone and my difficulties are part of a larger trend. depressing because it describes the problem, but doesn’t really offer much hope for the way out.
The Czech National Museum presides over Wenceslas Square in Prague and stands as a symbol in Czech history, beyond the collections contained within.
The facade of the building has lighter areas - patched up bullet holes from the Warsaw Pact troops in 1969 and memorial set into the pavement where national hero Jan Palach fell, having set himself on fire in protest against those same troops.
I have no idea how non-museos feel about this museum, about how people who enter the museum as something to tick off a list: ‘Prague - fortress, check. Josefov, check. Museum of some description…’ would feel about this museum. I was fascinated.
The museum displays are undoubtedly old and outdated. I saw not a single interactive, no new media, no modern lighting techniques, most galleries contained text only in Czech. In short, the museum was like it had stopped in time (presumably around about 1993, when they switched labels referring to Czechoslovakia to labels referring to Czech Republic and Slovakia). The comprehensive geological collection is presented ‘as is’, beautiful dark wooden cases display row upon row, room upon room of geological specimen along with their name and location where they were found. You marvel at the colours, hues, shapes and visual properties of the various minerals, but with no interpretation. What does this mean for me, beyond now knowing that such things exist?
The prehistory section was enjoyable, but that too comes with a caveat. I loved explaining what the archaeological objects were to Wolfgang (who humours me and probably knows a good chunk of it anyway) and how I could tell, in lieu of more than cursory description in English (and it also looked quite scant for Czech speakers too). There was a mixture of original artefacts and reproductions and the makings of what could have been a really informative exhibitions and nice overview of Czech prehistory, just rather uninspiringly laid out in glass vitrines along a wall, grey or beige.
I really liked the anthropology section which had lots of skeletons, and descriptions (in Czech!) about the differences between males and female skeletons and aging techniques such as dental eruption and epiphysial fusion. But again, it’s only accessible if you speak Czech, or have an (over-)enthusiastic Temperance Brennan wannabe (five years post archaeology graduation, which meant much of what was said was prefaced with, “now, I think…”)
Now, to be entirely fair there is a new section of the museum in a different building, but we didn’t make it that far. It seems strange that with the collection they have and the fantastic building it is housed in, that they would start on a new building and leave the old one to ossify at the main site.
Has anyone seen it? What did they think?
What Does it Really Mean to Serve "Underserved" Audiences?
“Let’s say you work at an organization that mostly caters to a middle and upper-class, white audience. Let’s say you have a sincere interest in reaching and working with more ethnically, racially, and economically diverse audiences. What does it take to make that happen?”
Via @museummedia on twitter: “On top of the country’s Devil and Witch museums, Lithuania will soon have an Angel museum in Anyksciai. The new museum will add to the country’s huge range of minature museums. The museum, which opens on July 22, will have an opening collection of over 100 items. The initial collection of the museum was donated by a former Lithuanian in exile who returned home after the country gained independence. The angel donor, Beatricė Kleizaitė-Vasaris, believes that the museum will help offset the devil museum in Kaunas. The museum has already seen some interest and development. It has a display area of 180 square metres and has funding from the local government for 150,000 litas (43,000 euros).”
BBC News reports on the largest exhibition ever assembled of mummiess opening in Los Angeles. Words could not do justice to how much I would love to see this exhibition.
The decline of Britain’s public museums (?)
I think there is literally nothing about this article that doesn’t make me seethe with anger. It is snobbish, elitist, and harks back with some sentimentality to the good old days when museums weren’t attempting to appeal to wider and more diverse audiences, weren’t asking themselves, “what can we do to make our exhibitions accessible to the vast majority of people in this country that haven’t studied Classics or have at least a spattering of Latin and Ancient Greek?” And, dare I say? More fun.
Writing for the arts section of the Independant, Adrian Hamilton acknowledges that:
“there is little doubt that the change in policy after free entry has immeasurably improved gallery going”
But this only serves to unsettle him it seems, that museums are being - gasp - made more accessible to non-experts and people who have a desire to learn about objects, periods, people they haven’t encountered in their working-class education. Hamilton implicitly lets it boil down to this by earlier referring to the educated middle-classes in opposition to these “normal’ visitors, who read captions - double gasp - an activity deemed “vulgar to the more aesthetic minds”.
Having acknowledged that free entry has improved visitor numbers and bemoaning the costs of ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions, audioguides and catalogues, Mr. Hamilton wraps up by suggesting that consideration be given to:
[…] the reintroduction of fees for museums. Children could remain free, the elderly given concessions and, like India and other Asian countries, ratepayers and taxpayers could be given lower priced access.
So that would just leave students, foreigners and the unemployed then? Great!
Goodness knows what terrible experience Mr. Hamilton has endured in a British museum in the last days to move him to switch from his normal emphasis on “international affairs with particular focus on the Middle East, Iran and foreign policy issues” to museum economics and their temporary exhibitions. Perhaps he made the grave error of hoping for a personal audience with the Rosetta Stone on a Saturday morning when it was raining outside? Perhaps he didn’t show up early enough to get the 11.15am slot he wanted for the Grace Kelly exhibition at the V&A? Perhaps we will never know.
Museum Aktuell - Free online edition of the German Museum Journal
Take a look at this free online edition of “Museum Aktuell: The Journal for Exhibition Technique and Museology in the German Speaking World”.
This month with a special edition dealing with Frauenmuseen (Women’s museums) internationally (focused on European examples, but not exclusively - US and Australia are represented too). Some of the articles are in English, but not all. Enjoy!
P.S. Two supplementary articles (one in German, one in English) can be found here.
