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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⋆.˚ how I like to manifest ! .𖥔˚
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To be honest, my kind of manifesting is like a lazy type because of how silly and laid back it is. It's good for loa babes like me who just wanna have fun manifesting, but don't wanna do too much.
But because of how complicated manifestation was made in the past years, you guys might see my manifesting as creative.
It just depends on how you, a master manifester, personally like to manifest compared to how I do things.
I like to call this process :
𐙚 shop, purchase, spawn ⋆.˚
Some of you read that and might be thinking "why is it shopping themed-" Silence. hear me out.
– what does it mean to "shop" and how to do it?
To shop means to browse, to look for, and to figure out what you want.
Like you would do before you go to a shop or even while you are in a shop, you would see something you like and wonder to yourself, "oo I really want this " or "Wouldn't it be so nice if I had this" or "Omg I have got to have that" something amongst those lines. This is the first half of my shopping process.
The second half is to look for whatever tickles my fancy and add it to my basket. But how do I do this, and where do I look for my desires? Literally anywhere. But my favourite shopping area is definitely pinterest (just like any other manifester), so let's use her as an example: To shop on pinterest would be to scroll or search for whatever my desire is. To place in a basket would be to sort it into a board.
– what do you mean "purchase", how to do it?
To purchase means to buy something; usually using digital or physical money. Or, in my case, to finalise the fact that it is mine/decide it's mine, by using affirmations!
Affirmations is my currency. When I give some affirmations, I lose some affirmations in order to "buy" my desire.
What I mean by this is that it's like a trade offer with myself. In order to buy my desires, I must trade in some limiting beliefs I have about the desire with new ones that support the fact the desire is now mine. Do you get it?
I traded my old beliefs for new beliefs for my desire in return!
– what does it mean to "spawn", how to do it?
To spawn means to appear very quickly or from nowhere in seconds. For me though, this would just be a simple word for "instant delivery" or "instant reality shift".
Now this is all spawning is. It is me shifting my reality to one where everything is the same but my desired affirmations have materialised instantly. To spawn a desire is to instantly shift to a reality where my affirmations about having my desire has materialised.
I love to spawn my desires instead of going through the process of having to collect it from somewhere (which IS still the manifestation of my affirmations but I'm just too lazy dude☠️😭)
𐙚 the world is a supermarket, and everything is free ! .𖥔˚
This is where my silly imagination gets creative, yall. I'm about to put you guys on some "shops" where you can "purchase" your specific desires from. Here are some obvious ones:
— what you can "buy" on pinterest !
Clothes, Shoes, Accessories, Wigs
Face claims, Body claims
Houses, Apartments/Penthouses
Food claims
Vehicle claims
Aesthetic claims
— what you can "buy" on tiktok ! (And youtube)
Song/Audio claims
voice claims/Accent claims
Face claims, body claims, personality claims
Fame claim
Aesthetic claims
Closet claims
Significant other claims (platonic or romantic)
Relationship trope claims
Room claims (bedroom,bathroom living rooms etc)
— what you can "buy" on Google maps
Houses, Apartments/Penthouses
Islands (😭)
Environment claims
Vacation spots
— what you can buy with your phone camera
I really love using my phone camera to shop for new desires guys because you can take a picture of ANYTHING.
You want to live in a specific neighbourhood? Take a picture of it and purchase is. Want the cutest clothe set you just saw in the window of a store? Take a picture and purchase it.
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Anyway thats all I have to say for now.
CIAO!!😙💋
Tags I'm tryna put some cool loa babes on. Tell me what you guys think : @esotericc-angel @etherealkissed88 @edwadio @livingmydreamlife5555 @theshifterbear @nondualiber @ponchigg @ningsols @themanifestingbrat @4ellieluv @dollfaceirene @babygothprincess @revrealities
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let's pretend that this is the right timeline because what if Dick becomes Batman at the same time when Wally becomes The Flash?
let's also say that this is just like the Justice League animated series wherein the League members don't know each member's identities (except of course Bruce, he knows everybody).
how funny would it be if Dick and Wally are together and the rest of the League are confused because all of a sudden Batman and Flash are close like super close? i mean they have witnessed how Flash gets intimidated by Batman. now, that's not the case anymore.
during a meeting:
Hal, leaning to John during a League meeting, whispers: I'm not losing my mind, right?
John, whispers back: I think I know what you mean.
Hal: Why is Flash making heart eyes to Bats????
John: I know??? Flash doesn't even look him in the eyes before.
Hal: That's so odd, dude.
Batman glances at the two Green Lanterns which makes them shut up.
meanwhile, across the table, Martian Manhunter has a light smile on his lips and Superman covers his laugh with a cough.
-
at the cafeteria:
Ollie: Hey, Dinah. Have you noticed something unusual between Batman and Flash lately?
Dinah: It is quite unusual, huh? I was talking to Hawkgirl the other day and she said she saw Flash bridal carry Bats.
Ollie: What the actual fu-
Flash, approaches the couple's table with a big bowl of nachos on his hand: Hey, guys! Mind if I sit with you?
Ollie and Dinah give a knowing look at each other. a conversation they definitely will finish later.
-
during in an another planet mission:
Batman, after announcing everyone's partners for the mission:... And lastly, I will pair up with Flash in today's mission.
Flash grins widely, that has Arthur thinking his cheeks might be hurting after that.
Arthur: Yeah, yeah. At this point, we already know, Bats!
the Green Lanterns, along with Captain Marvel and Booster Gold, snicker at his comment.
Batman ignores Arthur's comment and the rest of the members scatter to their assigned locations.
Victor, who was paired with Arthur: Was gonna give that comment too.
Arthur: It's like they are inseparable all of a sudden.
Victor, shakes his head: Well, I have seen weirder things.
-
in the meeting hall:
Wonder Woman, pulls Batman in the corner of the room: Okay, that's enough. You are truly ignoring me. What is going on with you lately?
Batman: Did the rest of the League put you up to this?
Wonder Woman, has her hands on her hips: They didn't need to. So, tell me. And don't you ever lie to me, I can see right through you, Batman.
Batman, sighs: It's hard for me to explain. I can't-I can't tell you right now.
Wonder Woman: Hera! Now, Bru-Batman.
before Batman responses, the door of the meeting hall opens and in comes Robin with his katana. the conversations between the League members come to a stop as they stare at the young hero.
Robin, glances at everyone, before approaching Flash: I need help with an important matter.
Flash, smiles and ruffles Robin's hair, as if that's second nature: Of course, little dude.
Hal, stands up from his seat: THAT'S IT! Can somebody tell me what the hell is going on????
Ollie, stands up with him: Are we in another dimension that I don't know about?????
Dinah pulls Ollie down by his arm to make him sit again.
the rest of the League members start to converse against each other.
Superman, floats a bit from his seat: Why don't we all settle down? There's nothing to be alarmed about.
Robin, shakes his head: Tt. Absolute fools.
by the time Bruce and Barry are back:
-
Bruce, pinches the bridge of his nose: Chum, you could at least be discreet with Wally.
Dick: It's not my fault, B! I swear I was going to explain to Aunt Diana then Dami entered the room.
Damian: Tt. Don't blame me, Grayson. Why don't you lecture West on how to be more responsible? He left me on read when I asked help for my Science project.
Dick, sighs: And what about Timmy? He could have helped.
Damian: I don't want anything to do with Drake.
Bruce massages his temples as he feels a headache coming up.
-
Barry: Wally!!!!
Wally, zooms right in front of Barry: I couldn't help it, okay?? Dick is just irresistible.
Iris giggles as she prepares the table for dinner.
Barry, sighs: That's alright. I'll talk to Bats on how we can explain it to the team.
Wally, grins and sits down by the table: It was hard not to laugh at them. They were so confused.
Barry, chuckles: I'm sure Hal's expression was the funniest.
Wally, laughs: You have no idea, Uncle Barry.
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