Its limited 6-day run gave an ephemeral quality to the whole experience, a “get-it-now” urgency that was only enhanced by the truly breathtaking exhibition design.  Suspended from the arched ceiling of the Park Avenue Armory in New York, the quilts (all red and white yet all unique, hence the show title) swirled around in spiraled pods.  People could walk amongst and between them, standing inside the groupings or apart to get a glimpse of the whole mesmerizing display.

I only had an hour there so I didn’t take the self-guided iPad tour, choosing instead to experience the overall environment.  For a show like this, though, I think making the label text accessible through another device rather than trying to integrate them into the design was a genius idea.  It wouldn’t work for most exhibitions and I’d hate to see museums forgo labels on a regular basis but for a show as unique and visually engaging as this one, label text would just distract from the incredibly sensory experience of being surrounded by 650 floating quilts that span three centuries of American textile craft.

As a relatively recent college graduate and (fingers crossed) a future museum professional, I probably shouldn’t be admitting this.  But what is the internet for if not shameful confessionals?  And here is mine: I am something of a Harry Potter fan.  Now, I’m no fanatic – I don’t belong to any Harry Potter fan sites or livejournal groups (do they still have livejournal groups?).  I’ve never been “sorted” by some online quiz (although I think if I were I’d probably be Slytherin, and I’m not sure what that says about my moral compass) and I certainly don’t own any house scarfs or fake scar makeup.  I can, however, translate the Hogwarts motto from Latin to English (“never tickle a sleeping dragon,” ‘natch) and I figured out who RAB was about five minutes after I finished book six.  My point, dear readers, is that while I may not bleed wizard, I do know from Harry Potter.

All of this brings me to Harry Potter: The Exhibition, which is currently open at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.   The MSI is an interesting place – like many modern science museums, it has to straddle the divide between education and entertainment.  Sometimes it does so fantastically, like in the permanent exhibit on modern farming techniques (only in the Midwest, man) and other times it misses the mark dramatically (an enormous fairytale dollhouse? Really?).   So how does Harry Potter: The Exhibition measure up?

Harry Potter: The Exhibition (from now on called simply “Harry Potter,” because adding “the Exhibition”gives it WAY more gravitas than any show about movie sets deserves) is actually pretty cool to look at.  The show is made up entirely of the original props from the first five movies, plus some select pieces from the upcoming “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (Horace Slughorn represent!)

The exhibition is relatively well-laid out, especially given that it’s set up in a giant special occasions tent outside of the museum.  It’s understandably popular, so visitors are assigned shifts in order to stagger the number of people in the tent at any time.  Even so, it’s crowded – kids and parents jostling with excited teens to get a glimpse of Hermione’s pink sweatshirt from the third film or gaze enraptured upon the Gryffindor boys dorm set.

And the objects certainly are impressive.  Peering into Hagrid’s hut and seeing the everyday objects made huge to fit his giant scale, getting up close and personal with a 3-D mock-up of the terrifying Dementors – it’s all really cool.  The colors, the fabrics, even the crowded walkways convey the feeling of actually being inside a Harry Potter movie.  So yeah, great layout and design, especially considering the limitations of being in a freaking TENT.

So what’s missing?  Well, a lot, actually.  Walking through the exhibit, seeing the Potions classroom rebuilt before your eyes or getting to plop down on Hagrid’s enormous chair is all well and good, but what’s the point?  I mean, what makes Harry Potter: the Exhibition any different from the movie disasters ride at Universal Studios?  Nothing, and that’s a shame.

And once again, I understand that the MSI and blockbuster exhibitions like this one have a difficult job when it comes to mediating between being educational and getting people in the door.  And I’m not a total square: I understand that “edutainment” has a place in museums.  Harry Potter, though, is too much tainment and not enough edu.  The curators of the exhibition (who, I’m pretty sure, are not MSI employees – this is a big traveling show) had the opportunity to teach visitors about all the different kinds of work that go into creating huge fantasy films like Harry Potter, and they missed the mark.  I mean, set designers and builders, costumers, art departments: with a movie like Harry Potter, they’re building whole new worlds for us to explore.  Why not craft an exhibit that lets the visitor see how that world-building works on a micro level?

Just off the top of my head, I can think of three different ways to work that educational, informative aspect into the show:

1. How wonderful would it be to walk through an exhibit on Harry Potter and watch video interviews with costume designers discussing how they put together Bellatrix Lestrange’s Psycho Chic look?
2. Or get to see the process of building a wall of the Great Hall from it’s first incarnation as a small model to it’s final life-size version?
3. I, for one, would love to sit in Hagrid’s enormous chair and watch a video of normal sized people building all these oversized furniture pieces.

Maybe I’m giving the average Harry Potter fan too much credit, but I think most of the people in that tent with me would have loved to learn more about the behind-the-scenes work that went into creating their favorite film series of all time.  Just a hunch.

On an unrelated note, I’ve found myself thinking about the unique issues that go into mounting a show like this.  I mean, the pieces in the exhibition aren’t old or fragile, for the most part, and many of them are there to be touched.  Which means you can do crazy things like mount the show in a non-temperature-controlled TENT (I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m really worked up about this) and let people breathe on things and generally make a nuisance of themselves to a degree that would never be tolerated in a regular museum show.

At the same time, though, because people can get so close you have to do an even better job of assembling the show.  In any exhibit there are tiny little mistakes that slip through the cracks, and it’s okay for the most part because the average visitor won’t be getting close enough to see them.  Here, though, the visitors can see all the awkward padding on the mannequins and the unintended rips and tears on the furniture that come from excited HP fans crawling all over them.    I think it probably requires an entirely different way of thinking about exhibit construction.

So, what’s the final say?  A fun and interactive exhibit on a beloved book and film franchise that could have been so much more interesting and informative than it was.  I so dislike seeing such potential wasted, and if that makes me sound like a Hogwarts professor, than so be it.  I’ll be in the dungeons, teaching Muggle Studies.

Now, granted, there are only a few more days left to February, but that still leaves a little bit of time to check it out without paying a dime.

Okay, one ado: this review is remarkably apt, given that I’m moving to Chicago tomorrow to start an internship at the Chicago History Museum working in their costume collection.  The collection is the nation’s second largest of it’s kind and has over 50,000 objects.  So if you’re find yourself in the Windy City, look me up – maybe I can sneak you into the back to take a peak at a 100 year old Worth gown.  I’ll also be continuing with The Museumist, but the focus will be on Chicago museums, not SF.  I’ll miss your fair coastline and foggy days, San Francisco Bay Area, but have no fear – I’ll be back to visit.  After all, the Academy of Sciences just reopened, and I can’t stay away from that crocodile pit!  But enough about me – on to the review!

For my first real exhibit review on The Museumist I decided to combine my newer love, museum exhibits, with a time-tested favorite: pretty clothes that I can’t afford.  Hence the review of the de Young’s current special exhibit: Yves Saint Laurent.

The Yves Saint Laurent show opened on November 1 at the de Young in San Francisco.  Mounted in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and with help from the Fondation Pierre Berge-Yves Saint Laurent , it is intended to serve as a retrospective of the famed designer’s legendary work and influence.

So I’m probably in the minority here, but I love text boxes in museums.  You know, the mounted boards with the exhibit copy on them that tell you what you’re looking at and why it’s important.   I like the big ones that sit at the beginning of each section of any exhibit, explaining what pulls all the pieces together.  Sure, text boxes run the risk of over-explaining and thus limiting the breadth of learning that a person can experience.  I maintain, though, that a well-written text box can provide a sense of the theme, idea, or even abstract concept that the curator was drawing from when they assembled a specific section without destroying a visitor’s ability to draw their own ideas from the display.   I guess I just enjoy being informed.  I’m usually not expert enough on any subject being exhibited that I don’t mind being talked down to a bit in exchange for really great information.   And that, I think is my main frustration with the otherwise stellar YSL exhibit at the de Young – it just wasn’t informative enough.

Yes, fashion is exciting.  And I love looking at sumptuous fabrics and intriguing designs.  But wasn’t there more to YSL than just superior draping?  Why devote an entire special installation to his work if there isn’t something that raises it above even the most superior couturiers?

The YSL exhibit touches on the way the designer related to the changing social atmosphere of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.  It explores, to a limited degree, how he designed for a “modern” sort of woman, using a funny anecdote about Nan Kemper’s visit to a restaurant in Paris.  She was wearing a new pantsuit designed by Yves Saint Laurent, and when the maitre d’ saw she was wearing pants to a formal meal he reacted poorly.  But really, who can blame him? Pants at dinner? So low class.  So Kemper, in the way of the daring YSL woman (so sayeth the text box) simply took off her pants and turned the tunic into severe miniskirt.

The anecdote, coupled with examples of pantsuits and items that the daring Ms. Kemper actually wore, is a fun way to show what the “YSL Woman” was thinking and doing, but what about what YSL meant for fashion in general?  Or how his work informed later designers, what sort of changes he wrought?  The exhibit discussed YSL’s beginnings at Dior and how he worked within the New Look and later worked to defy it, but isn’t there more?

Yves Saint Laurent was French and was born and raised in Algeria.  As a white designer he drew a great deal from influences in his childhood, incorporating “ethnic” designs and creating pieces inspired both by his childhood in Africa and his travels abroad as an adult.  In the section titled “Imaginary Voyages,” the exhibit shows runway lines inspired by the ethnic and national garbs of a variety of different regions in the world.   Beautiful stuff, all of it, and fascinating to look at, but the accompanying text box reads that rather than traveling the world, Yves Saint Laurent liked to look at pictures of foreign locations to stimulate his imagination, so that they would “grant him freedom to evoke visions according to his own whim.”  Hm.  This is interesting.  A designer uses pictures of foreign places in order to incorporate what HE perceives as their cultural heritage into his extraordinarily expensive clothes that will primarily be sold to affluent white women.  There is a world of interesting and complex ideas to explore here, but the exhibit refuses to approach them.

Yes, this is a retrospective, but that doesn’t mean it has to be fawning.  The “Imaginary Voyages” section provided a perfect opportunity to engage with some of the more complicated aspects of Yves Saint Laurent career and legacy.   I would have loved to see the exhibit explore issues surrounding cultural exploitation and appropriation, the role that primitivism played in YSL’s work, the question of exoticizing “the other” in fashion, an industry that is already so laden with questions regarding objectification and the role of women and minorities.  That the exhibit chose to gloss over that by simply discussing YSL’s grand imagination and vision for his collections is a shame.

Also, a related criticism: all the mannequins in the exhibit where white, except the ones in the section of “Imaginary Voyages” devoted to Africa.  They were blue.  Obviously the question of race is a complicated and important one in fashion, from the discussion of the models themselves to issues surrounding cultural exploitation. Did the exhibit designers really think that making the mannequins in the African garb section a different color wouldn’t stand out?  And if they didn’t want to make racial commentary (as their avoidance of YSL’s complicated relationship to race and nationality might lead one to believe), than why make such a clear and sharp differentiation between the white mannequins in the rest of the exhibit and the blue ones in that one section of “Imaginary Voyages?”  It was a confusing and unnecessary distraction.

A museum is not just a collection of text boxes, so we must discuss the layout and design of the exhibit.    The layout was clean and easy to navigate, with distinct sections.  The lighting wasn’t great – if I’m looking at clothes, I want to really be able to see them, and the dim lighting made that difficult.  So much of the beauty of a well-made piece comes from its seamless design and execution, and how can a visitor take that in if they can’t see the details of the object?  This is all the more true for YSL’s more luxurious pieces, some of which are practically weighted down with piles of sequins, crystals, and rhinestones.   Why display a veritable treasure trove of shiny things if you don’t get to see them sparkle in the light?

The different sections are organized according to certain themes, and they generally work well.  One illustrates the relationship between the designer’s sketches and his final products, pointing out that with YSL the idea and the actual garment are almost identical.  The clothes were lined up, with the sketches mounted on the wall at the end of the section.  The idea is a fun one, but I think it might have been even more effective if the sketches were displayed next to each piece as opposed to each grouped separately.

I guess that sort of criticism is really what bothered me about the YSL exhibit: it’s a solid show that could have been an exciting, critical, and intellectual retrospective if the curators had made just a few small but important changes.  A more critical approach to the subject himself, a deeper interest in the role of fashion in society and history, and some small design changes would have taken the YSL show from solidly good to absolutely fantastic.

There are many reasons why we should all be looking forward to the Robert Frank show at SFMOMA (or the National Gallery of Art or the Met, depending on what city you reside in.)  Robert Frank changed modern documentary photography when he made “The Americans.”  Before it was all about classy, well-lit pictures – as Gefter puts it, “sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether serious war coverage, social commentary or homespun Americana.”

Frank’s photographs were black-and-white captures of everyday people doing everyday things.  Critics hated “The Americans” calling it overly-critical of America because it passed over the breezy  “anything is possible” attitude of the pop culture of the times (“The Americans” was published in 1959) in favor of a more modest and honest portrayal of American life.  Frank said that in America it seemed that “everyone was sort of alone more,” and his photographs captured that sense.

Frank had a unique perspective on America; in 1947 he moved from his native Switzerland to the United States and traveled cross-country repeatedly, taking the photographs that would become “The Americans.”  And following in the tradition of foreign-born critics eventually embraced by America, Frank is now considered an artist with a true grasp of what it means to be American, as Gefter writes: “Twenty years after “The Americans” was published Gene Thornton wrote in The New York Times that “The Americans” ranks “with Alexis de Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ and Henry James’s ‘The American Scene’ as one of the definitive statements of what this country is about.””

Gefter writes that there is a distinct sense of loneliness that pervades “The Americans,” a loneliness that came as much from Frank’s own sense of isolation on the road as from his subjects themselves.  In the article Frank explains to Gefter how he was drawn to the lonely on the road: ““Setting off on a trip, well, I guess I was attracted — because it’s a more photographic theme — to follow the people that are alone instead of being at picnics or swimming.”

I’m looking forward to seeing this sense of American loneliness mixed with what Gefter describes as “a romantic quest to honor what was true and good about the nation.” It will also be interesting to see the Frank show and how it is interpreted for modern viewers: after all, Robert Frank was a pioneer of the “snapshot aesthetic,” and what is our present-day culture’s obsession with constant and spontaneous photographic documentation if not a bizarre grandchild of that movement in photography?

I’d heard a little about MOCA’s trials and tribulations – my brother Isaac Resnikoff, UCLA MFA graduate student and all around talented artist was visiting recently and updated me on all the crazy shenanigans going on down south – but I’m ashamed to admit that I wasn’t aware of MOCA’s importance in the art world until just a few weeks ago.

Maybe it’s the Northern California bias I was raised with or my persistant (and false) belief that the only thing worth visiting in the LA area is Disneyland, but I’ve never been to MOCA or even thought about it as one of the stars of the museum world.  Apparently, though, I’m very, very wrong.

According to Smith, we have MOCA to thank for the concept of the star curator. It’s original director Pontus Hulten (and how awesome a name is that?) and those who followed him were quick to put the curators first.  This lead to some really incredible shows that, according to Smith, “reshaped our thinking about postwar art,” and challenged local LA artists, helping to create a vibrant art scene in Los Angeles.  It also lead, at least partially, to the huge financial disaster that is looming over MOCA’s future.

Smith lays out the two most obvious options for MOCA.  The first is a merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which she says would have an effect on the art community equivalent to what would happen to New York if the Met took over the Whitney.  Bad news bears, essentially.  The second is a bailout by Eli Broad, who she calls a “developer, collector, and serial museum trustee.”  I like that: a serial museum trustee.  So does he run around, endowing institutions willy-nilly?  Because if so, I have a museum for him: The Shoshana Resnikoff Gallery of Unpaid College Loans.

But in all seriousness, the problem with a single-person bailout is that it gives said single person too much control and has the potential to rob the museum of it’s autonomy.  Which brings us to Smith’s hidden third option: a grassroots bailout organized by “nonrich” art lovers.  She proposes that everyone who feels that MOCA has in some way improved their life, LA culture, and the art world in general should try to donate what they can to a rescue package for MOCA.

Personally, I love the idea.  In an age when the new President can get elected on the backs and pocket-books of average Americans, what could be more appropriate than a community-organized museum rescue?  Of course, financial speaking I’m not sure how feasible it will be – with the economy the way it is, I can’t imagine people lining up to give money to a contemporary art museum.  Still, maybe that could be a nice recession-style Christmas present: give your friend the art lover a donation to MOCA in their name this holiday season.

This sort of grassroots organizing might also help to make MOCA an even more important part of LA’s landscape.  If the museum’s endowment is essentially rebuilt by the contributions and efforts of run-of-the-mill folk, that will help to create a sense of personal investment in the well-being of the museum that might serve it well in the future.

Of course, I should be practicing what I preach,  which is why I’m considering making a small donation to MOCA… once I get a paying job, of course.

The thing about Australia, though, is that it isn’t known for its museums.  Don’t get me wrong – the island continent has a lot to offer, museum-wise.  But when I was traveling around with my fellow study-abroaders trying to get a sense of what we absolutely couldn’t miss, there was never a helpful Australian citizen or Lonely Planet book saying, “oh, you can’t leave without making it to the Australian National Maritime Museum,” or something similar.  So we did all the “important” things, like going to Manly Beach or doing a tour of Victoria’s wine country, seeing the Sydney Harbor Bridge and visiting the Opera House, and somewhere along the way I missed a bunch of museums.

Which is why I’m all the more thankful that I took a course called “Museums, Objects, Spectacles,” while I was at Melbourne University.  By  far the most difficult class I took, “Museums, Objects, Spectacles” was about the history and philosophy of museum exhibition; the Whens, Whys, and Hows of exhibiting, if you will.  Besides giving me a crash course in museum history, the class also got me out and about visiting Melbourne’s museums.  Arguably the cultural capital of Australia (Melbourne sees itself as the New York to Sydney’s LA), Melbourne has an awful lot of quality museums.   I spent the most amount of time at the Melbourne Museum, where I reviewed an exhibit called “Melbourne: Stories of the City.”  Looking at the Melbourne Museum website now I can’t tell if the exhibit was permanent or not, but their current permanent city exhibit called “The Melbourne Story” is likely very similar to the galleries I saw in 2007.

I thought I’d kick off The Museumist with a walk down memory lane and revisit the first museum exhibit review I’ve ever done.  The review I wrote for “Museums, Objects, Spectacles” was long, academically-minded and, in retrospect, not quite as earth-shattering as I remember it being, but I’m going to try to distill it down to the pertinent points. So if you’re interested in a short  analysis of an Australian history exhibit from the perspective of a non-Australian, click for more.

“Melbourne: Stories of the City” is an interesting exhibit because it shows that Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theory of two models of democracy producing two models of exhibiting is not quite as cut-and-dry as one might have thought.  Assuming, of course, that one found oneself pondering the cut-and-driedness of Chakrabarty’s theories, which I imagine doesn’t happen very often.

Chakrabarty wrote in his essay “Museums in Late Democracies” that there are two types of democracies with differing relationships to museum exhibiting.  The first, the pedagogical model of democracy, is concerned with creating citizens and teaching people how to be politically active members of society. As Chakrabarty wrote, “It was assumed that becoming a citizen, possessing and exercising rights, called for appropriate forms of education.”   The nineteenth century museum is the ideal pedagogical model.  Order was taught through taxonomy and scientific examination, and displays privileged “the conceptual or analytic over the lived.”

The second democratic model is a performative one, in which a person’s experience is the only education they need to be capable of political action.  The personal is political, and therefore identity politics are a legitimate form of political engagement.  In the performative museum model, oral histories and objects have importance outside of the support they can give to analytic understandings of history.  Experience trumps archives, as Chakrabarty explained, “The politics of experience orients us to the realms of the senses and the embodied.” “Melbourne: Stories of the City” (M:SotC) serves as proof that an exhibition can appropriate ideas from both models., using characteristics and tactics from the performative model to perpetuate a story that rightly belongs to the pedagogical model.

What does this mean in practice?  Well, lets start, appropriately enough, at the beginning, where a chronological display of Melbourne history shows display cases of Aboriginal tools compared to colonial surveying tools.  By describing the Aboriginal environment as “mapping out a spiritual landscape” and then referring very concretely to the future site of the white city of Melbourne, the exhibition undermines any physical claim the first groups might have to the actual land.  It is actually a very neat act of satisfying everyone while simultaneously satisfying no one: it acknowledges the centuries-long presence of Aboriginal groups in the area while also perpetuating the myth of an empty Australia just waiting to be settled. The use of surveying tools is particularly important.  These displays put forward the idea that that the Aboriginal people had a “spiritual landscape,” while the Europeans had a vision for a physical city, discounting any presence of a physical, vital Aboriginal community that stood on the land for centuries before.

This pattern of paying lip service to the presence of a disenfranchised group while essentially passing it over continues throughout the exhibition.  Melbourne, like most Australian cities, was built on the back of immigrants.  At the beginning those immigrants were of Irish and British descent, but very quickly other European groups and even Asian immigrants began pouring into the city.  You’d be hard pressed to find much mention of the waves of immigration, though, based on the M:SotC exhibit.  In the section about the social life of the city’s inhabitants in the early twentieth century, for instance, a display of objects from the various fraternal orders and social brotherhood groups illustrate the diversity of options for British and Irish Melbournians.  The text alongside it mentions “the diverse cultural origins in Britain and Ireland” but avoids discussion of diversity from outside the British Isles.  Italians, Greeks, Chinese: they would have been excluded from those fraternal orders and most likely formed their own groups, so why not include artifacts from their organizations?

There is a section that deals with immigration, but I even managed to find fault with that one.  (Which, in retrospect, might be more a critique of my judgemental self than of the exhibition…)  A display on a recent archaeological dig at Little Lonsdale Street shows pieces of pottery, hair brushes, liquor bottles and other artifacts used by the immigrants who populated the neighborhood during the late 19th and early 2oth centuries.  The display is engaging, but by separating it from the chronological story of Melbourne the designers of the exhibition take it, and thus the immigration experience as a whole, out of the mainstream of the “story of Melbourne” and ghetto-ize it in the corner of the gallery space. The placement of the Little Lonsdale section, at the end of the chronological history, marginalizes the story of the immigrants, physically removing them from the stream of Melbourne history.  The accompanying text discusses  the dirty environment of Little Lonsdale, reading:  “Its dingy lanes seemed full of malice, and many Melbournians shunned the area.”  The immigrants who lived in Little Lonsdale were themselves citizens of Melbourne but by identifying the more upper-class, mostly Anglo population of Melbourne as “Melbournians,” the display assigns to the immigrants the default position of “the other.”

And then there is the issue of women.  Women get a similar treatment to that of immigrants in the M:SotC exhibition.  Women make a huge contribution to any society, and Melbourne is no exception.  The main mentions of women in the M:SotC displays, though, have to do with shopping and the growth of department stores in Melbourne.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I love shopping as much as the next lady, but the absence of women from displays on the workforce and the physical growth of the city is marked.

Catalogues from early department stores are displayed as items that interest women.  This case is part of a section on the progress of the city during the early twentieth century and it stands next to a display of office-building innovations such as clocks and lift mechanisms.  Whether it was intended or not, the comparison between the important mechanisms that keep a city moving – clocks, lift mechanisms, phones, and so on – and the products used to entertain the female leisure class– advertisements for department stores, hat pins, images of wealthy women strolling – contributes to the vision of women having few important roles in historical Melbourne.

The display of industrial innovations borrows something from the great exhibition halls of the nineteenth century, allowing the visitor to marvel at the technological advances that society has made, and wonder at their ability to build a living environment.  In the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880, an entire section of the exhibition hall was devoted to Victorian machinery, seen as “proof in abundance of Victorian industrial and manufacturing capacity.”   More than 100 years later and the same kind of machinery is being displayed as proof of man’s ability to build a lasting metropolis.  It is a display that implicitly underplays women’s contributions to society.

And now you’re thinking, “don’t be such a Debbie Downer, Museumist!  There must be something good about this exhibition!”  And there is quite a lot that is good about the M:SotC exhibit: a display on “Neighbours,” one of the longest-running soap operas in Australian history stands out especially.  “Neighbours” is set in a Melbourne suburb and can be credited with the creation of such stars as Kylie Minogue and Eric Bana.  I would also argue that it is probably Australia’s biggest export behind Tim-Tams and Crocodile Dundee.  For sheer entertainment value, nothing beats being able to walk through the original kitchen set of “Neighbours” and listen to producers and former stars discuss the show in video displays.  A section on the history of sport in Melbourne is also very good, mixing cultural history with local pride and discussing some of the more exciting moments in regional sport history.

And really, I don’t mean to be such a drag about this issue of performative exhibitions and inclusion; I guess it’s just that I expect more from the Melbourne Museum.  With the revamping of the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Center, the Melbourne Museum has proven that it can engage deeply with complex, controversial issues that strike at the heart of what it means to tell Australian history.  Bunjilaka dealt with much more difficult and traumatic history, and did so well (at least in my opinion.)  So why, after something like that, would they drop the ball in “Melbourne: Stories of the City?”

Anyway, if you find yourself in Melbourne with some time to kill, you should certainly check out “Melbourne: Stories of the City,” or “The Melbourne Story,” as I think it’s called now.  It will give you a solid background on the history of the city, and you’ll get a lot out of it so long as you remember that despite its name, it doesn’t tell the whole story of diverse Melbourne.

On the off-chance that I get to do any traveling (unlikely, given the state of my bank account and those troublesome college loans), I’ll be sure to review some of the noteworthy exhibits I see.  If you see any exhibits you think deserve a mention, be sure to drop me a line.

Let’s just be clear on one thing: museums are serious business, but this blog isn’t.  I don’t have a degree in Museum Studies (although I’ll be working towards an MA in that venerated field soon, I hope), but what I do have is a critical eye, an academic background in American Studies, Religion, and Art History, a good sense of humor and years of museum-going to back me up.  Also, I have a true and abiding love of museum exhibiting, nurtured in me by a childhood spent at the California Academy of Sciences and too many readings of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  Since I can’t move into the Met like Claudia and Jamie Kincaid did, this will have to do instead.