I'd like to second Candace's comments. I'd be willing
to wager that these are people who filled the theaters
for Mel Gibson's Passion (and stayed away from Roger
Moore's Fahrenheit 451), propelled certain "End Days"
novels onto best seller lists (and protested the
DaVinci Code) and demanded the redo of Victoria Secret
windows because they were a corrupting influence on
young people (Mayfair Mall, Wauwatosa, WI, last year,
among other places.)
If the price of attracting people with such a strong
anti-science attitude is to dilute and obfuscate the
message, it would be better to leave them outside
protesting our exhibits about evolution and culture.
Attempting to attract this particular vocal minority
is carrying the "political correctness" to a surreal
Religion, including the parts we chose to label
mythology, and science are widely different ways of
explaining the world around us. Individuals can
create their own belief system that blends both,
natural history museums cannot.
Judy Turner
Whitefish Bay, WI
--- Candace Perry <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I expect that these museums are quite literally
> tapping into an untapped
> audience of persons who would otherwise not set foot
> in museums. And at the
> risk of being woefully pessimistic, I don't think
> we're going to rope them
> in, no way, no how.
> Candace Perry
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museum discussion list
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
> Behalf Of Rizzo, Mary
> Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2007 4:54 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: The Creation Museum
>
>
> Not to weigh in on the worth or lack thereof of a
> creation museum, but I
> think there is room for comment on some of the
> larger issues regarding
> what counts as a museum. Certainly many scholars
> argue that all museums
> contain ideological messages, subtly or not. As the
> NY Times article on
> the Creation Museum points out, the very idea of the
> museum as a place
> where the world is categorized into significant and
> insignificant
> objects is ideological. Or we could think back to
> controversies like the
> Enola Gay exhibit which was wrapped up in ideologies
> of national history
> and memory. A great text on this is Barbara
> Kirschenblatt-Gimblett's
> _Destination Culture_ which looks at how and what is
> given value by the
> museum.
>
> Secondly, following Karl Wolff's link to the
> Creation Evidence Museum,
> I'd like to point out that the museum is described
> as "packed --
> literally, to bursting" with visitors. Can't think
> of many other
> traditional museums where that's the case. Why are
> people flocking to
> such a museum? Right there we see why we should
> consider this issue a
> little more seriously.
>
> Finally, I'd like to also address the concept of
> kitsch. I think its too
> easy for museum professionals to dismiss kitsch as
> worthless of our
> regard (after all, it wasn't that long ago that
> professional historians
> and others dismissed women's history, working-class
> history, popular
> culture, and so on, as unimportant). Kitsch has an
> important place in
> our consumption-oriented society. Usually it's the
> detritus of popular
> culture, thrown by the wayside and reinfused with
> worth by someone else.
> What that suggests is that one person's kitsch is
> another's dear
> treasure. Dismissing something as kitsch often shows
> a particular
> cultural, intellectual and class orientation that
> doesn't ask the
> important questions about how society is working.
> I'm thinking about
> this for an article I'm writing and I keep coming to
> the same
> conclusion: museum professionals, public historians,
> etc should try to
> understand the role of kitsch rather than merely
> dismiss it. Clearly,
> there's a large proportion of the population out
> there that is very
> interested in these kinds of things.
>
> Best,
> Mary Rizzo
>
>
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