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As long as I'm posting off-hand opinions about Medieval literature, I think Perle is the best poem. Just, like, in general. Out of all of 'em that have crossed my desk so far.

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Bronze incense burner in the form of a peacock, Seljuk Empire, 12th-13th century

from The Brooklyn Museum of Art

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@headspace-hotel has made some pretty informative posts about this… I’m having difficulty finding them at the moment, but I think the gist of it — or at least the bit you could use as a counterpoint — is as follows.

The reason that, in some areas, leaving your lawn un-mown for a short period of time seems to lead to finding ticks is actually because of all the mowing and pesticides: the process kills off or drives away most of the other animals in the local ecosystem. Ticks are pretty hardy, though, and their main food source is still there (in the form of you and your neighbors), so they stick around. That’s why so many suburban lawns seem to get filled with ticks as soon as you look the other way: it’s actually a pretty good environment for them.

If you leave your lawn to its own devices for longer, or actively plant native species, the number of ticks in your area will probably go down because animals that compete with or eat ticks will start showing up again now that the space is hospitable to them. (Of course, your interlocutor may or may not dislike those animals as well… anyone who’s as vocally pro-lawnmower as the original post indicates probably has a hostile relationship with wildlife in general.)

Apologies if this is wrong; I’m trying to recount posts I remember reading in the past. If it is wrong, I hope someone will correct me.

Can I get some anti-lawn people to weigh in on the issue of ticks? Because people who mow their lawn too damn often, they're always like "durr hurr not mowing a lawn means ticks", and then they look horribly smug when I don't have a response to that. All I know for positive about lawns is a) they look stupid when they're mowed and b) I hate the sound of lawnmowers, neither of which is accepted as a counter-argument.

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I just noticed @dduane reblogged this and would like her to know that the Young Wizards series is my go-to whenever a customer asks me for a Kids/YA recommendation.

One of the things I’ve noticed working in a bookstore is that a surprising number of people are completely unfamiliar with the normal way books are organized.

(I mean, in the part of the store where we keep the used books, I frequently have to assure people that the books are organized at all, but that’s because we have way more books than we have shelf space and there’s no way to handle that without it looking a bit of a mess.)

On one hand, we get customers who are apparently a completely blank slate in this area. I frequently have to walk people through, like, “Okay, it’s organized by subject / genre, then by author. Oh, ‘by author’ means in alphabetical order by the name of the author. No, their last name.” (Most of the people I give this talk to are, I think, college kids — it’s a bit strange to me that you can reach that age without knowing how bookstores work, but then again, I can kind of see how these days it’s possible to mostly get your books online where you just use a search function.)

One customer responded to the above explanation with “oh, it’s the Dewey Decimal System!” and I had to be like… no. Similar in broad concept, yes, but the Dewey Decimal System is a very specific thing (involving… decimals) and it’s really only used in libraries, not bookstores, because it kind of requires you to label the spines of your books, which bookstores generally don’t like to do for obvious reasons.

On the other hand, we also get customers with pre-existing incorrect assumptions, which are so often similar that I think they’re being imported from other media (though I’m not sure what).

People seem to expect the organization of Fiction to be much more granular — e.g., “where’s historical fiction?” “oh, that’s just in with general fiction.” I think some of that comes from movies (people ask where the “rom-com” section is, and that’s definitely a movie thing), but I’m not sure that’s always the reason.

(Admittedly the fiction organization is a bit more granular in the Used Books area than it is in the New Books, but that’s because there are certain genres that we get tons of from people selling us their old books, but we don’t buy enough of on purpose to justify giving them their own section in New Books.)

At the same time, people have the opposite assumption about Non-Fiction — i.e., they expect there to be one singular section labeled “Non-Fiction”, which is not the case. I’ve had multiple conversations that go like:

Customer: Where can I find non-fiction books?

Me: You’ll have to be more specific.

Customer: You know, non-fiction.

Me: [gesturing at the signs hanging from the ceiling that say things like “science”, “philosophy”, “art”, “history”, etc.] All of these are non-fiction in their own special way.

I try to be nice about it, but I don’t think I always succeed, just because I’m so often legitimately surprised and confused when someone just doesn’t know How Do You Books. I’m getting used to it now, but I’ve been working there for almost five years, so there’s been quite a long adjustment period in between.

Anyway. Just some observations.

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The true difference between an alien designed by a writer vs an artist is a writer gives an alien 16 fingers per hand while an artists gives them 3

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Reverse Shadowrun

That is, a generic fantasy world where capitalism returns after a thousand year absence and starts turning random people into regional managers.

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Grumpy bird

Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 264, f. 112r

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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!!!

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So, okay, it's well-known that there's a certain kind of transphobe who gets upset when you refer to a person by pronouns other than their "biological pronouns." This is, of course, stupid as all hell. Pronouns are not biological you fucking idiot. It's also not ungrammatical: grammar does not actually take a stance as to which pronouns to use for which thing. Semantics might have something to say about that, but even that is largely based on social agreement. Grammar might have a stance on how verbs should conjugate based on the pronoun used, but in that case most people will show their whole ass by goin "Well I can't use singular they because how will verbs conjugate? I can't say 'they is'" I mean, you could, but most people would consider that ungrammatical (but literally grammar is also in flux and changes through use), but you could also say "they are," because as it happens English already has a case where a pronoun can act as both plural and singular and verbs will conjugate as if it were plural: this mysterious pronoun is "you."

Anyway so not only is this often revelatory of the fact that a) transphobes are often language cops and b) they don't actually know shit about language, but within the context of Indo-European languages English is actually unique in one way: English has a lot of gendered vocabulary, but what it lacks is grammatical gender.

Grammatical gender is actually a more specific expression of a noun class system. Previously in linguistics people did use the terms interchangeably, but the former is more accurately a specific form of the latter.

A noun class system is ultimately just a method for typing nouns into categories often based on some arbitrary criteria, and they may have effects like requiring agreement in adjectives, verbs, affixes, etc. Grammatical gender is when those arbitrary classes are supposedly based on gender. Again, it is still mostly arbitrary, because there's no specific reason for idk the noun "lion" to be masculine, "moon" to be feminine, and "tree" to be neuter.

Anyway the conflation of noun class and grammatical gender has led to such claims as "in the Dyirbal language one of the genders is 'women, fire, and dangerous things,' isn't that hilarious?" which is inaccurate to say the least because what's being described isn't a gender but a noun class (that does contain women in it).

Masculine/feminine is of course a very boring system of grammatical gender. The old workhorse of masculine/feminine/neuter is okay if a bit boring. Anyway my personal favorite is the Swedish utrum/neutrum, commonly translated as "common gender" and "neuter". I don't know when the shift happened, but at whatever point in its development Swedish still retained the traditional Indo-European masculine/feminine/neuter division, and instead of doing the most boring thing possible and dropping neuter in favor of a binary masculine/feminine system they went for the other binary: that's right, grammatical gender in Swedish is yes/no.

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That probably is part of it, but honestly you could say the same thing about a lot of art. The context and process is often extremely important.

I frequently see Internet Discourse that’s along the lines of:

Poster: Here is a photo I took at an art museum of a painting that’s just a big square. Why is this here? This is nothing. Modern art is silly.

Various Responses: You fool. You philistine. Big Square is brilliant and important because [discussion of technical aspects of its creation] and [discussion of historical context] and [discussion of how it’s in conversation with other art of its time] and [discussion of the artist’s personal experiences]. Just because you wouldn’t buy a print and hang it in your living room doesn’t mean it’s not great art.

And, like, the responses are coming from well-informed people who do genuinely understand the art, and they’re entirely correct about the importance of Big Square, but —

The plaque at the museum just says “Big Square, Joe Artist, 1985”. So the person who said it was silly is the one who’s engaging with the exhibit on its own terms. If you’re not going to provide the context that lets people understand it, you can’t be upset when people don’t understand it.

Science museums and history museums and such are very good at providing the information that helps visitors understand what they’re looking at. Art museums don’t seem to have fully caught up there, and the result is that they’re not doing a great job making art actually accessible to the public. Which, theoretically, is a big part of their mission. (I mean, they do provide some resources, like audio tours or docents, but these are less convenient than just having it written down. I think there’s a certain aesthetic hang up, where you want a big spacious gallery with discreet little plaques because it looks nicer when it’s not cluttered up with informative displays.)

Art is also a process in addition to a product, though said process is less formalized than the scientific one. All that context is also important. But there’s a tendency for art museums to display it as if it is just about the product, so if you don’t come in already knowing the context you’re just out of luck.

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!!!

[maniculum]

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!!!

#mildly worried about upsetting the Art People with this reblog #but OP makes some excellent points

[maniculum]

Minerals formed by serpentinization include the serpentine group minerals (antigorite, lizardite,

lizardite is formed by serpentinization <- things said by a modern scientist and definitely not some kind of alchemist

[maniculum]

Bestiaryposting Results: Zomargon

Another fairly obvious one -- perhaps made more so by the fact that I left a couple identifying terms in. Usually I try and sift those out: e.g., for the deer I replaced "doe" with "female [X]" and for the wild ass I replaced "bray" with "call". This time Past Me apparently didn't think to replace "trumpet" or "trunk". Whoops.

General note, please forgive if this seems disorganized or rushed; I'm a bit feverish I think.

Anyway, here's the entry:

If anyone was confused by all that, please see https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting. Art below in rough chronological order.

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) took this in a truly delightful direction. The animal itself is very good, and I think the little sketches really enhance it, but the in-depth explanation of their design decisions in the linked post is what really makes it. Genuinely very charming animal in that context; I like it a lot.

@sweetlyfez (link to post here) gives us a beast complete with a warrior-tower-arrangement on its back. Genuinely a pretty good fit for the entry all around, and of course the real gem is the hairdo. Hey, the entry says it has hair, it's up to the artist to decide how to style it.

@moonygryffin (link to post here) has drawn "Mammoth Cube", which until just this moment I has no idea was a thing. Have to give it to them, though, that animal clearly has no knees and would be really easy to put a tower on top of. Good work, cube.

... dating myself a bit there... wait, that strip is still going? Huh. Anyway.

@pomrania (link to post here) has created another Strange Mammal. There's something about the stylized profile views they draw sometimes that really appeal to me. Also, the Zomargon is of course an ace icon -- it's right there in the first sentence of the entry -- so instead of carrying people into battle, it's carrying them in a pride parade. Good for them.

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) has laid out this illustration in a very appealing way, I think. I'm not a real art critic, so I can't say why, but I just like it. I also like the general design here -- both that they're giant boars with skinny stilt legs, and that the domestic and wild versions differ in the same way as domestic and wild pigs. Additionally, I'm glad someone decided to illustrate the mandrake-courtship thing, because I thought that was an interesting concept.

@cheapsweets (link to post here) gives us this nicely sepia-inked illustration. I like the little sketches; for these entries with lots of details, I think it's nice to toss some extra stuff in the margins. Also the design of the snout and tusks is just really good, in my opinion. As usual, for interesting details and design choices, please check out the linked post.

Aberdeen Bestiary time!

... well, okay, not actually. A good chunk of the entry is left, but the page with the illustration on it is missing, so we're going to the Ashmole Bestiary again.

All right, so this is obviously the elephant, but I don't like any of this.

Maybe the proportions are just off, or maybe the illustrator didn't really believe how big elephants were, but that elephant is not big enough to be carrying that tower thing and four knights. The tower is nearly as big as the elephant is!

And that guy in front doing the steering -- you can't use reins? You have to use a chain that's attached to its trunk like the world's most inconvenient nose piercing? And what is that stick for, exactly? Unacceptable.

Maybe this is my modern bias, but I really feel this could have been a very cool illustration if they weren't being gratuitously cruel to the elephant. They even gave it a distressed-looking face! Why, good sir?

#maniculum bestiaryposting #zomargon

[maniculum]

I think some people take basically a "malicious compliance" approach in that situation. You know, "this technically fits all the details given, and the entry doesn't say it's not a sparrow the size of a city bus."

Bestiaryposting -- Gaersnae

As a reminder, all previous entries in this series can be found at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting .

[Etymology redacted] … it is the king of crawling things, who flee when they see it, because it kills them with its scent. It will even kill a man just by looking at him. Indeed, no bird can fly past unharmed by its gaze but, however far away, will be burnt up and devoured in its mouth. The Gaersnae can be conquered by weasels. Men put them into the caves where the Gaersnaes lie hidden. The Gaersnae, seeing the weasel, flees; the weasel pursues and kills it. For the Creator has made nothing without a remedy. The Gaersnae is half-a-foot in length, with white stripes. Gaersnaes, like scorpions, seek out dry places; after they have come to water and bite anyone there, they make that person hydrophobic and send them mad. The creature called [redacted] is the same as the [redacted], or Gaersnae; for it kills with its hiss before it bites or burns.

Remember to tag posts with #Gaersnae so folks can find them.

[maniculum]

One small but extremely annoying effect of Tech Modernization or w/e is how UI contrast is garbage anymore, especially just, like, application windows in general.

"Ooh our scrollbar expands when you mouse over it! Or does it? Only you can know by sitting there like an idiot for 3 seconds waiting for it to expand, only to move your cursor away just as it does so!" or Discord's even more excellent "scrollbar is 2 shades off of the background color and is one (1) pixel wide" fuck OFF

I tried to move a system window around yesterday and had to click 3 times before I got the half of the upper bar that let me drag it. Why are there two separate bars with absolutely nothing to visually differentiate them on that.

"Well if you look closely-" I should not!! have to squint!!! at the screen for a minute straight to detect basic UI elements!! Not mention how ableist this shit is, and for what? ~✨Aesthetic✨~?

and then every website and app imitates this but in different ways so everything is consistently dogshit to try to use but not always in ways you can immediately grok it's!!!! terrible!!!! just put lines on things again I'm begging you!!!!

#damnable machines

[maniculum]

That honestly makes a lot of sense as a way to approach those mass-market-paperback romances.

Our method is... um... worse.

See, back before I started working there, apparently the fire marshal was getting real antsy about the whole "more books than shelf space" thing and insisted that we clear out the aisles a bit more. Part of the owner's solution was to take all those really formulaic by-the-numbers genres that nobody really buys anymore (that would be Romance, Western, and Christian Fiction) and move most of them to a basement storage area. There's a sign on the shelves that says basically "if you want one of the authors on this list, ask the clerk to get the box for you". We have hundreds of those damn things for two bucks a pop and I think I can count on my fingers the number of times during my tenure someone has actually asked to see any of them.

(A few weeks ago someone asked for a specific series of westerns that's a few dozen books long, and when I brought it out they tried to haggle on the two-dollar price tag. Unfortunately I don't have the authority to cut a deal for customers, because I would have given them a dollar to take the whole box out of here. Instead they bought I think only two books.)

Hearing that the genre has mostly moved to e-books actually tracks pretty well; I don't imagine people really think of them as something to re-read over and over, so it seems right to go with the option that doesn't clutter up their shelves.

One of the things I’ve noticed working in a bookstore is that a surprising number of people are completely unfamiliar with the normal way books are organized.

(I mean, in the part of the store where we keep the used books, I frequently have to assure people that the books are organized at all, but that’s because we have way more books than we have shelf space and there’s no way to handle that without it looking a bit of a mess.)

On one hand, we get customers who are apparently a completely blank slate in this area. I frequently have to walk people through, like, “Okay, it’s organized by subject / genre, then by author. Oh, ‘by author’ means in alphabetical order by the name of the author. No, their last name.” (Most of the people I give this talk to are, I think, college kids — it’s a bit strange to me that you can reach that age without knowing how bookstores work, but then again, I can kind of see how these days it’s possible to mostly get your books online where you just use a search function.)

One customer responded to the above explanation with “oh, it’s the Dewey Decimal System!” and I had to be like… no. Similar in broad concept, yes, but the Dewey Decimal System is a very specific thing (involving… decimals) and it’s really only used in libraries, not bookstores, because it kind of requires you to label the spines of your books, which bookstores generally don’t like to do for obvious reasons.

On the other hand, we also get customers with pre-existing incorrect assumptions, which are so often similar that I think they’re being imported from other media (though I’m not sure what).

People seem to expect the organization of Fiction to be much more granular — e.g., “where’s historical fiction?” “oh, that’s just in with general fiction.” I think some of that comes from movies (people ask where the “rom-com” section is, and that’s definitely a movie thing), but I’m not sure that’s always the reason.

(Admittedly the fiction organization is a bit more granular in the Used Books area than it is in the New Books, but that’s because there are certain genres that we get tons of from people selling us their old books, but we don’t buy enough of on purpose to justify giving them their own section in New Books.)

At the same time, people have the opposite assumption about Non-Fiction — i.e., they expect there to be one singular section labeled “Non-Fiction”, which is not the case. I’ve had multiple conversations that go like:

Customer: Where can I find non-fiction books?

Me: You’ll have to be more specific.

Customer: You know, non-fiction.

Me: [gesturing at the signs hanging from the ceiling that say things like “science”, “philosophy”, “art”, “history”, etc.] All of these are non-fiction in their own special way.

I try to be nice about it, but I don’t think I always succeed, just because I’m so often legitimately surprised and confused when someone just doesn’t know How Do You Books. I’m getting used to it now, but I’ve been working there for almost five years, so there’s been quite a long adjustment period in between.

Anyway. Just some observations.