On Thu, 27 Oct 1994, Nicole Bouvier wrote:
 
> Also - keep in mind that you may have skills that you might not
> immediately think are applicable to museum work. I got my first museum
> job in college - as a somewhat dissatisfied architecture student, I
> volunteered to draft exhibition plans for a student exhibition that a
> friend was working on, and was subsequently hired to draft for the
> college museum's exhibition designer. It never would have occurred to me
> to think of my drafting skills as a possible "in" to the museum field
> before I actually did it - what kinds of "non-traditional" skills do you
> have that might possibly be applicable?
>
> Nicole Bouvier [log in to unmask]
>
     Another thing to keep in mind is how badly bright, clearheaded
people are needed in the museum field, which in my experience tends to
collect more intellectual clutter than any other.
     I'm a fulltime museum reviewer for the Washington Post, with no
particular qualifications other than a lifetime fascination with museums
and art, catholic taste, a lifetime of reading and thirty years of
general newspaper and magazine reporting.
     I'm a literate layperson(ugh!) in other words. Yet I seldom pass
through an exhibit on any subject, in any venue, without finding silly,
serious and/or egregious errors of fact and inanities of interpretation.
This is perhaps understandable in the case of small museums, but most of
my work involves the Smithsonian Institution, widely regarded as being
one of the intellectual standard-bearers of the world.
     Some of the errors are absolutely unbelievable. Harvard biologist
Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, contributing commentary to an exhibit at
the National Museum of American Art, spoke of initials carved on tree
trunks long ago and now grown out of reach. This man has taught biology
at Harvard for more than 30 years, and still hasn't learned that trees
grow from the top, so that a mark made on the trunk stays at the same
level so long as the tree stands. This grade-school error made it past
countless "highly trained" Smithsonian staffers and into the exhibition
catalogue.
     At the Heye Center, the branch of the National Museum of the
American Indian that opened yesterday (10/30/94) in New York City's old
Customs House, there is a falsified quotation from Mark Twain on the wall
that should have aroused the suspicions of anyone with even a nodding
acquaintance with our most famous author, and that can be checked in a
few minutes in any neighborhood library. Twain's words have been
deliberately twisted to reverse their meaning, so that he is praising
Indians rather than mocking them as intended. Whether it's a case of
cupidity or stupidity I dunno, but in either case it's a result of the
intellectual shallowness and ideological fervor that have increasingly
marked the Smithsonian in recent years (I'm sure we all remember the
infamous deconstructionist "The West as America").
     So keep punching, Kid, and don't take no for an answer. We need you!
 
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