Rich, I did not intend to characterize your comments
specifically as a rush to judgement, but rather the explicit
suggestion of "replacing" the Director. That is a rush to
judgement that the Smithsonian Secretary has, to his credit,
apparently declined.
There are, no doubt, complicated questions about the
function of a museum and its relationship to the marketplace
raised by this controversy. Given differing possible
interpretations of an event, if everyone wants to see a
story told in a certain way, your post suggests, then that
is how the museum should present it. After all, museums do
have responsibilities to the marketplace.
I'm sure that you are accurately describing the way museums
will increasingly function. My sense is that the American
voice is becoming more audibly fractious, with views
formerly not represented in Academia or in Museums trying to
gain some access. And, I'm sure that many of these voices
will be perceived as threatening to mainstream consensus,
particularly the consensus represented by congresspeople,
etc.
And, judging by the response to the current dustup, Museums
will respond to this consensus. And so it goes, and, in my
limited knowledge, it was always this way: those with the
power get to tell the story.
But one final question: what in the world is wrong with
using "hindsight" to present the context of a story? Isn't
that what historians do?
A story today in the Times, an adjunct to the story about
the cancelling of the exhibit, presents the factual
controversy in what seems to me to be a fairly balanced
light. The gentlest way that I know to put it is: the
calculation of casualties avoided in Japan, and the
motivations behind the dropping of the bomb (whether, for
example, it had an element of warning to the Soviets) appear
to be subjects on which honest and well-informed people can
disagree.
Eric Siegel
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