It’s with great sadness that I read NPR’s story about the US potentially losing a third of its museums.
Melissa and I adore museums; even the bad ones, like the ones with misspelled placards, entertain us.
Karlissa often deals with jetlag by heading to a museum to stay awake. We make notes and take pictures and talk about the museum book we want to write. We carry stickies to fix the problematic placards.
We were supposed to go to a Museum Conference this Fall, in fact. Melissa would have talked about her monuments and memorials class, while I was going to wax poetic about being the only American in the American Museum in Bath, England.
There’s a paper–or something–I want to write about Museums in popular culture and literature, from the way they’re lovingly derided in The Simpsons (“Hey, kids, I’ve learned that in two weeks the Springfield Museum of Natural History will be closing forever due to a lack of interest. I urge you to see it while you can!”) to their complex portrayals in apocalyptic literature like Children of Men and Station Eleven.
What’s striking to me know, though, is a political irony. Though our museums only get about a quarter of their funding from the government, Conservatives often have museums on their defunding lists. With their current hold on the Senate and the Presidency, it’s unlikely museums will get the help they need.
The irony comes from the newfound hysterical cries from the right to preserve history.
They’re talking about statues, whose didactic power is narrow.
If we truly want to preserve history and to learn from it, we need our museums.
