HEY GUYS!!

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

if i see one more article, post, or news anchor talking about how joe biden is old, i'm putting my fist through a window. i feel like i've gone through the fucking looking glass.

this is project 2025, trump's plan for what he'll do if elected. whatever you think is in there, it's worse. watch a breakdown of the highlights here. this man wants to unravel the fabric of our democracy for good - this all aside from his vitriolic hatred of poc, his determination to start ww3, and the fact that he can't string a sentence together without telling outrageous and easily verifiable lies. his administration will start their crusade to exterminate trans people on day one, and they won't stop there.

do not talk to me about how joe biden is old, as if that could ever matter to me more than my life or the lives of my friends and family. my little sister is 14, she's trans, and i don't know what to tell her when we talk about politics, because one of these people wants her dead and the other one is old and some of you are still acting like those problems are equals.

i can't fucking stand this. i'm not hearing it this time, we are not repeating 2016. refusing to vote is not an act of protest, it is an act of complacency, and our most vulnerable will suffer for your negligence. vote like your life depends on it, because for some of us, it really fucking does.

Team Green as Pigeons just because…

So let me get this straight - Alicent was “evil” and “crazy” and “overreacting” for wanting an eye for an eye (a belief she doesn’t normally hold unlike Daemon) in a moment of fear and desperation after her son was permanently maimed and her husband’s response was to not give any punishment at all to Luke, sending a message to everyone that Alicent’s children don’t matter even to the King and anyone can harm them without recourse. Viserys even threatened to further maim and disable “anyone”, meaning Aegon and Aemond, by cutting out their tongues to protect Rhaenyra’s obvious lies. Viserys proved he will never protect Alicent’s kids and Rhaenyra confirmed Alicent’s fear that she will kill her children by not even trying to apologize or show any remorse or diplomacy at all (but Alicent is the enabling boy mom, and also an abusive bitch when she does punish her son for being a perv… okay) instead blaming Aemond and demand he be “sharply questioned” (aka probably tortured) for exposing her lie. Of course Alicent would want to make a show of strength back after such a clear threat to herself and her children.

But a grown man ordering the murder and decapitation of an innocent toddler is totally justified. Like they’re celebrating the murder of a toddler, I know not all Team Black people are doing that but enough to be deeply disturbing. And this is the same grown man who cut the hands off of poor people for stealing while he has never known what it’s like to not have food or clothes. Hammurabi’s Code is totally good with Team Black except it’s barbaric and evil when it’s over Aemond being disabled and disfigured for life by his childhood bullies. Even if it was gonna be revenge, Aemond should’ve been killed then (even though he didn’t mean for that to happen, he’s more responsible than a baby). That’s what Rhaenyra wanted. Daemon is a psychopathic abuser who can’t help but undermine Rhaenyra’s power and the lengths people will go to justify his actions astounds me.

In regards of the Trump government scraping all trans inclusion in its queer information portion of its websites I have made this thing. Spread the word. Don't let them pretend we never existed.

P.S: Don't like! Reblog! <3

I don't know about y'all but I find it very funny and a bit satisfying that despite all the anti-feminism and conservatism and pro-patriarchy accusations Alicent was thrown, so many people of color and queer folks (and other definitely radically left-leaning people) still watched hotd and rallied behind her and flock together to defend her (despite being accused of being pro-conservatism ourselves in doing so).

And I wonder... Why is that? What nerve did Alicent touch that make us so protective of her, of her story and point of view?

Don’t try defending this

"I thought I wanted it. But the burden is a heavy one. It's too heavy. If you wish me to bear it then defend me. And my children."

I wonder what burden she feels she's holding at this moment. We know that she isn't speaking of the burden of ruling and managing the realm for the last several years while her father was sick, because while she was on Dragonstone, those duties fell to the Hand and the Queen. As far as the show tells us, Rhaenyra has no specific duties she's fulfilling as heir, nor has she been doing anything in particular to prepare to rule. We're not shown that she's doing anything with her time beyond anything beyond managing Dragonstone with Daemon and growing her family. So what exactly in her life at this moment is she seeing as this massive burden that she bears because she's heir to the throne?

I think the burden she's speaking of here is actually the pressure she's feeling as she's finally being faced with the idea that her father won't always be around to help her avoid the consequences of her actions. So even though it's obvious that he's on the edge of death, in immense pain, barely hanging on, and despite the fact that she hasn't visited him at this point in literal years despite knowing about his ailing health and she's done nothing to support him in ruling in his last years, she still feels entitled enough to demand that he do another massive favor for her. At this point, Rhaenyra has been enabled by her father for so many years that she doesn't know how to solve a problem without him. So she plays the heir card on Viserys to get him to defend her one more time: if you want me to be queen, and you don't want me to be held accountable and face consequences, help me get away with it one more time.

Rhaenyra is upset not because of any real burden she has as heir but because she feels like the walls are closing in and she's under attack. I would feel some sympathy for her if it weren't for the fact that she wouldn't be in this situation if she'd made better choices. If literally anyone else in the realm had obvious bastards they were using to usurp a seat of power, there would be huge consequences. Rhaenyra knows this and is doing it anyway because she thinks her position as heir to the throne gives her the power to be able to do it and get away with it. Her birthright as a Targaryen says she deserves absolute power because she's better than other people, so she can do no wrong and nobody can say otherwise to her. She believes she's clever enough to pass the deception, and otherwise her father can punish anyone who speaks up... until Vaemond goes to court, and her father is not there to blankly support her no matter what. Now, she's faced with people who intend to uphold the law of the land and she's upset that she might actually be confronted with her problems head on and not have someone to shield her this time.

as expected, now that ep 1 with b&c will be aired in 2 weeks, people are getting weird.

please keep your "b&c wasn't that bad" shit takes out of the general tags <3 mind you, these are the same people that have been whining about "misogyny" for the last 2 years, but are now apparently ok with an innocent woman being tortured to the point of literally becoming a shell of her former self & a 6yo girl being threatened with rape.

and to all of the pro-b&c weirdos saying "bUt iT wAs aBoUt AeGoN", so 1. b&c is justified because aegon threw a party? 2. daemon also threw a party when his nephew and sister in law died, but y'all don't want to talk about that. 3. even if aegon was the one to kill luke, it still doesn't justify what daemon did to helaena and her kids - you're actually justifying a woman being punished for the crimes of her male relatives - and it doesn't matter if it's aegon or aemond.