On Thu, 20 Oct 1994 07:13:41 CDT, Douglas Greenberg wrote:
 
>I receive Museum-L in digest form so please forgive the lack of a specific
>header here.
>
>I am writing about the various postings with respect to the NASM and the
>Enola Gay exhibit.  The issues are fairly complex, and they are being
>confused in much of the debate.
>
>The first question (and the more important one in my view) involves principles
>about muesum exhibition and the authority of curatorial scholarship.  As a
>matter of principle, museums and museum workers should be prepared to say
>that curatorial authority for interpretation should be as sacrosanct
>in museums as professorial freedom and authority are in universities.  The
>museum world has been shamefully slow in asserting this principle and in
>defeniding it, in my opinion.  It began with art museums in the Reagan-Bush
>years, and history and science museums are now starting to catch hell.
>
Maybe I'm dense, but it seems to me that exhibits are different from
lectures in courses or even entire courses.  Professorial freedom entitles
faculty to think and teach what they want, I guess, and the university
should defend that.  But at some level, at least, in an exhibit, it is the
museum, not the curator,that is speaking.
 
>The second issue involves the present case of the Enola Gay exhibit and its
>content.  I am not prepared to say what I think about the quality of  an
>exhibit that I have not seen, and I wonder why others feel so confident that
>they know precisely what is in the exhibit, especially since the reporting
>about it (including in Museum News) has been so slight, slanted, and partial.
 
I think a lot of us are basing our comments on the Smithsonian press
releases on the exhibit posted here on Museum-L in which NASM explained what
it thinks it is doing and why.  Maybe not the best source but, as you say,
we are not yet in a position to evaluate the exhibition itself.
 
>Museum exhibits ought to provoke and ought to bve controversial. They also
>should make us uncomfortable from time to time.  If this one does that, it
>will succeed, I think, even if at the endo of the day I disagree with its
>interpretation.  Arguments for "balance" like that made by Chancellor Heyman
>in his innaugural address at the Smithsonian can be covers for emptying
>exhibitions of their capacity to educate and provoke debate.
>
I don't disagree with any of this, but I do think we have to recognize
that this is probably the only exhibit any institution will ever do about
the Enola Gay and it is certainly the only exhibit about it that most of
its visitors will ever see.  That has to affect the institution's thinking
about how the way it is handled; if NASM were to offer a series of
tendentious exhibits from multiple perspectives on the Atomic Age and the
origins of the Cold War then it's a different matter entirely.  But as long
as this is the sole treatment it raises certain kinds of responsibility
issues.  If you want to make people uncomfortable, you have to be prepared
to deal with the consequences.
Ken Yellis
Assistant Director for Public Programs
Peabody Museum of Natural History
170 Whitney Avenue
Box 208118
New Haven, CT 06520-8118
[log in to unmask]
(203) 432-9891/9816(fax)