This blog will comprise a collection of ephemera, mess and miscellaneous artifacts reflecting on the writer's life.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Fake Tales of San Francisco

This is my next destination.
Here are some museums I can see there.
These images remind me of a book I am reading which is about museum identity, called Re-imagining the Museum:Beyond the Mausoleum.
Witcomb argues that the museum is an institution caught up in nineteenth-century origins.
if you look at the San Fransisco museums, you can see that they have this kind of classical architecture, important building kind of thing going on.
Andrea Witcomb argues here, however, that rather than see museums as bad objects, we need to see museums as a site from which to theorise change.
Rather than retain their status as repositories of important valuable, old and classical objects, they can open themselves up to irrational, complex and popular spaces.
I am continually surprised how open museum curators are to this, and how willing they are to place miscellaneous, and complex objects within their collections in a disruptive manner.
Like this item.

Echo through the room.

Museums can make mistakes however. David tells us that the Natural History Museum don't want the whale after all - see his comment.
Who says commenters don't have status?
They are like the general public, invading the space of the blogger, who like the museum curator, has to find room for them.
Perhaps we need to recognise fake tales for what they are.

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