I had no intention of continuing my musings on the Penn Museum’s absent mummies and artifacts in their “Secrets of the Silk Road” exhibit (see Don’t Demonize the Chinese: Happy New Year, Rabbit). This is not because I was being pressured by the director of the museum to stop blogging about this (in this blog that hardly anyone reads! What was he worried about?). He warned of consequences for me and my department but since I was already fired by this same director (see What’s in a Name?: The Real End of Anthropology) I can’t imagine what other consequences I would suffer. The pillory? Shaming? Wearing a big scarlet “A” (for Anthropologist!)? I reminded him of the rules of Academic Freedom (and I should have added good ‘ole American Free Speech) and it has rested since then.
I was willing to let all this go until the article in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer online. It was just too funny to pass up the opportunity to comment on the latest news.
The article reports that the museum, knowing for a while (at least two weeks) that it was going to have trouble getting actual artifacts for this exhibit, started manufacturing fake mummies, or “dummy mummies” as someone in the museum came to call them. It also included cutout photographs of the objects that could not be used. Now, since this show’s entire foundation is pretty objects, that is just the funniest development, these low-tech representations of real precious artifacts. I wonder if anyone in the museum sees the irony?
The director of exhibits was quoted as saying, “We had to do something. We had so much invested in this.” Ugh! Did she really say that? How crass that must sound to the paying public. How about, instead, “We had to do something. Our audience really deserves more than pretty objects. They deserve an intelligent conversation about culture and ideas and people and contact and time and travel and concepts of space and being.” But, alas, you will never hear that coming out of the current museum designers at the Penn Museum. They have too much invested in it.
The really funny part of the news article is that one visitor is quoted as saying, “If they hadn’t told me, I probably would have thought they were real” and another supposedly asked, “”The mummies aren’t here?” Maybe the museum shouldn’t have told anyone and just duplicated all the objects secretly. Who would know or care? Well, actually, the museum itself would because it has entered the arena of potentially-blockbuster shows. In this arena, the goals is getting bodies in the door. With this comes boasting rights: I got more people than you, I got to show harder-to-get objects than you, I got more publicity than you, I sold more stuff in my shop.
In the museum world, there has been an interesting discussion on whether museums actually need to have and show all their objects in order to carry out their mission (see Steven Conn’s book). I would argue that any museum could make a very compelling exhibit with anything (even dummy mummies) as long as there were some Big Ideas behind the exhibit. These Big Ideas recur in all the important cultural conversations we have (in literature, history books, novels, music, art, movies, mythology, every format you can think of): what does it take to be human, what is valuable, what differences matter, who is us and who is other, who gets to decide all these things, and so on.
But that is not what was happening at the Penn Museum. This was not an effort to turn around and go in the right direction away from a failed exhibit. You have to remember that this show was advertised for its spectacular objects with descriptions of the beauty of the female mummy being most prominent: .”…with graceful eyelashes, long flaxen hair and serene expression, the ‘Beauty of Xiaohe’ seems to have just fallen to sleep.” Sheesh! When anthropology/archaeology museum exhibits are based on the beauty and uniqueness of their objects, then they are playing in that different arena: that of the art museum blockbuster. That is pedigree of this show (it was formed by the Bowers Museum in California which is known for its display of material culture from other cultures as if they were fine art) and it is not an accidental part of the problem here.
Everybody supposedly loves mummies: isn’t that how this show was marketed? It was so funny, then, that one of the parents at the show’s opening stated that he didn’t care that the mummies weren’t there because his daughter was afraid of mummies anyway. The daughter said, “They’re just scary.” Amen.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer article described above:
February 7, 2011 at 11:54 am
In regards to your last two posts:
Painting the current situation as the natural outcome of pursuing the sin (or as you put it, “disease”) of commerce over the virtue of academia is overly simplistic and misguided.
Museums are complex cultural, civic, and commercial entities that can fulfill many roles and serve numerous constituencies that needn’t be considered mutually exclusive. Many museums can and have been able to strike a balance (albeit an often contentious one) between scholarly and commercial pursuits and the needs of numerous specialized and more general constituencies.
Please understand, I’m not touting attendance dollars as the ultimate benchmark for institutional success and I would criticize any who did. However, demonizing the efforts of a dedicated staff of, as you so dismissively put it, “non-anthropologists” who are working to expand the presence of the all to often overlooked and underrated Penn Museum in the city of Philadelphia as “cynical” is both insulting and ironic given the cynical tone of your own comments.
In addition, I’m afraid that the comments from your previous post are misinformed. The Penn Museum does not maintain several dozen marketing and visitor services staff and its exhibits are produced by a nine-member, in-house Exhibits Department.
Exhibitions do not come from marketing plans. In actuality, a multi-tiered committee made up of members of several museum departments determines which exhibit projects will be pursued. The potential for attendance is but one (albeit important) factor. After all, an exhibit that goes unseen can hardly be called relevant.
Secrets of the Silk Road is not an art exhibition, even though, as you said, it was organized by the Bowers Museum rather close to this fashion. The Exhibitions Department at Penn consulted with numerous scholars to develop a layer of interpretive context that offers the general public a view of an area of the world and a span of time that continues to impact their daily lives in subtle often completely unperceived ways. It was to include incredible, thoroughly researched objects to convey this story along with engaging interactives and other interpretive content. Had Secrets of the Silk Road been entirely dependent on the display of beautiful objects, it would not have been able to open at all.
This is what was “invested” in. When the objects did not materialize, the Penn museum mounted the other elements of the exhibit and refunded the special admission price to those who had already purchased tickets. The exhibit is now included in the general admission to the museum. That’s exactly the sort of behavior I would expect from cynical “non-anthropologists” out to make a quick buck.
Why shouldn’t reaching out to people and getting them into the museum be a fundamental goal? Why can’t museums cater their programs and exhibits to the needs and interests of their surrounding communities (yes, this is called marketing)? What is the inherent sin in bringing people through the door and showing them something amazing, in engaging them in the world around them and inviting them to learn not just about other people, but themselves?
February 8, 2011 at 9:45 am
I think the biggest insult to staff members of the museum, including you, is having outside consultants advise on the future course of the museum. You have been in meetings with these folks so you know this is the approach being taken. The reliance on outside consultants and outside (ie, traveling blockbuster) shows does open the museum to exactly the situation it is now in. I believe the museum should have proudly used its inside knowledge and its smart and creative staff (not just the show fabricators, the academic staff) to make shows from its own collection.
February 12, 2011 at 3:16 pm
“When anthropology/archaeology exhibits are based on the beauty and uniqueness of their objects, then they are playing in that different arena: that of the art museum blockbuster.”
I was glad of the diplomatic snafu because I got a chance to visit the Penn Museum yesterday and see the Silk Road exhibit for the price of regular admission. I was a little disappointed in the exhibit. I’m a student of tea, and it wasn’t clear until I visited that the geographic scope of the exhibit was solidly outside the tea regions. I have also done some study on silk, and I was surprised not to see more about the production and history of silk textiles. Yet the focus on “material culture as fine art” left me cold, and I wished there were more Big Ideas, or more of a story to be told. Mr. Mooney’s comment is telling, that “a layer of interpretive context” seemed added on after the fact to justify these spectacular objects. I wish the exhibit could have been packaged as “ancient peoples of Xinjiang.”
Yet the exhibit did get me in the door. Once inside, I most enjoyed the breathtaking Buddhist gallery, the informative Roman gallery, and the poignant “Righteous Dopefiend” exhibit, which was hard to locate, squirreled away in a lower corridor.