Some colleagues organized a bus trip to New York yesterday, which I went on, on the grounds that a) it was cheap, and b) in a few months, we won’t be doing much traveling at all for a while. This required me to get up at an ungodly hour to catch the bus on campus, and the trip itself reminded me of why I don’t take public transit, but on the whole, it was a good day. And, of course, blog fodder.
The purpose of the trip was to take students from the intro Astronomy classes to the American Museum of Natural History to see the planetarium show (cue Fountains of Wayne). As this show takes less than an hour, we were free for the rest of the day to wander around The City.
I did a very quick swing through the AMNH, because it was Take Your Shrieking Middle-Schooler to the Museum Day, or some such– there were probably thirty school buses in or near the museum, and vast packs of third-graders wandering around with name tags stapled to their shirts. There were lots of museum volunteers set up with tables of demonstrations, and the whole program seemed to be very well organized, but it was a littel, um, shrill for somebody who got up at 5am.
I did want to take in the highlights, though, because I have fond memories of the AMNH from when I was a little kid.
Well, OK, some of those memories involve being scared witless by the famous blue whale model, but that was memorable. And they’re done a nice job remodeling that room– the last time we were there, it was temporarily housing the snack bar, and all the models looked exceptionally dingy. Since then, they’ve updated the explanatory material, and added video screens on the upper concourse showing the fish alive and swimming.
This highlights the major problem with the AMNH, though, namely that huge swathes of the exhibits are very solidly in an older tradition of museum design. The nature dioramas are lovingly crafted, and very well done for what they are, but they’re awfully static. This is nowhere more evident than in the marine life section, because real fish are constantly in motion. Playing video footage of the fish livens up the room, but also draws attention to the fact that the models are, well, just models.
This was really the only option back when the place was conceived and built, but these days, there are lots of high quality zoos and aquariums out there where you can see these creatures in their full living glory, in some approximation of their natural habitat. That sort of casts a pall over the stuffed-and-mounted creatures in the AMNH displays, no matter how lovingly crafted the backgrounds are, or how good the explanatory text is. (And, for the record, the explanatory text is excellent).
The basic approach fares much better with things that are comprehensively dead, namely: Dinosaurs! Sadly, though, the big hall with the really impressive dinosaurs was closed– the sign said they were “preparing for a special event,” which I think meant some sort of fancy-dress fundraiser. This was disappointing to me, but it had to be absolutely crushing to the howling third-graders who were deprived of a chance to see the big carnivorous dino skeletons– you could get into the ceratopsians, but that was it. It also played hell with their very careful and detailed evolutionary presentation of the history of the dinosaurs, because a giant chunk was taken right out of the middle of the exhibit.
So, all in all, it was a disappointing morning. I decided to take what was evidently a hit, and sally forth across Central Park to get some culture at the Met, though I did return later to hit the gift shop and buy a fuzzy little triceratops for FutureBaby…
The static displays can also sometimes still be amazing. I was recently in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and nothing drives home the message of commonality among species and evolution like seeing all the amazingly similar looking skeletons next to each other. Skin and motion hides this. I can also vouch that a toddler was still entranced by these static figures and taxidermy.
On the opposite end I was also recently at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and I left depressed. It is now a “modern” museum with dozens of screens and interactive exhibits. Most of the place was just saturated with noise and light that did nothing but distract. The interactive exhibits were either talking at a too advanced level for anyone who didn’t already know what it was talking about or were just boring. The best things there were a small chick hatchery and, buried in a stairwell, an old exhibit of different gearing mechanisms to turn rotational motion into linear motion (with none of the explanations remaining).
Well-designed interaction is good, but well-designed static exhibits also have value.
Two questions:
Did you voluntarily donate to AMNH?
What’s wrong with the Schenectady planetarium?
I was in NYC on business and schemed my way into a full day to explore. I chose the AMNH, and the space show. It was great, I hadn’t seen one in years. I did notice that you could see the support grid behind the screen bleeding though, which was kind of distracting. Is this a common problem with planetarium screens?
The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto made some of the most amazing photographs I’ve ever seen, taken of museum nature dioramas in the 1970s. The dioramas are so good and the photography so masterful that the photos are perfectly poised in between looking real and looking artificial. The first one I saw, I spent a good five or ten minutes trying to decide if it was real or not. Small online images don’t begin to do them justice, but try White Mantled Colobus or Hyena-Jackal-Vulture.
I forgot to clarify that Sugimoto’s diorama photos were from the same AMNH discussed in this post. This blog entry suggests that at least the Colobus diorama is still there today. (It looks more real in Sugimoto’s black-and-white print!)
The AMNH is high on my list now that I live in the city. I’m definitely waiting until I can see the dinosaurs though.