Independence Hall and the Second National Bank Rant and Review

This museum trip was a much more interesting trip than I expected it to be. I find that happening more and more in this class. I absolutely dread going to these museums and hearing these people talk about them, but when I start to view the artifacts within the museums I am always pleasantly surprised to see the significance in the exhibits and why these people (my Teacher, the Curator, my fellow classmates) are so passionate about them. It almost (and I do say ALMOST) justifies the museums $24 million a year budget. (Just stating that alone is a huge step for me)

At the end of our tour, what brought me to this decision of almost justifying the need in society for this museum, was the curator's heartfelt speech. One of the main points of her speech was that this "museum" (a collection of Pearle's painting of important people) was setup to make people think. To use their brains in life and potentially influence their decisions in what they want to be, what they want to be known for, and who they are now. That is powerful and important stuff. I personally feel that the majority of people are just kind of floating around in this world paying attention to what they like and not paying attention to what the need to do nor planning properly for the future.

Theoretically, if the Pearle museum can influence 5% of its 5.2 million annual visitors to THINK about these aspects of life, then it truly justifies their budget and the need for these types of museums in society. On a side note, I think a much better approach would be to consolidate the artifacts of all the museums in one region into 3 or 4 central locations. This would be more affective in every way for museums and society.  First off you could close and sell dozens of locations/property and get rid of tens of millions of dollars in annual overhead for the city, state, and country. Then, you could have these central museums with different gallery segments devoted to specific old museums trade large parts of their collections with other cities central museums for 3 to 6 month periods kind of like they already do today with specific exhibitions but with large amounts of stuff. An example would be rather than doing an exhibition on Rembrandt, central museums would do exhibitions on the old Wagner museum, the old Pearle museum, and the old Powell house combined.

The logistics of constantly moving all of these artifacts around would make up for a lot of the job loss from the initial shutdown of the smaller museums. Now that we would be  saving a bunch of tax payer dollars while offering the same artifacts at more accessible locations here comes the most important part, the marketing.

One of the biggest problems I have seen so far in this class is that we (the students) are seeing all of these amazing and significant artifacts and before this point, almost everyone in the class did not seem to know that these artifacts existed let alone some of the museums themselves existed. By consolidating these 12-20 museums into 3 or 4 central locations, the visitors will be able to see so much more and get a bang for their buck while doing so. Someone in the museum community's rebuttal to this idea might be, ' If you are putting them all in one place, people are not making as many trips to see the artwork, not paying for as many taxi's and dinners, and tickets for each individual museum and spending less money overall. Wouldn't you losing GDP dollars in the long run?' and the short answer is no. People will continue to go to these museums time and time again because using this new method of large scale 3-6 month exhibitions people will be going to see and noice that 40% of the museum's stuff will be new, so it will like visiting a new museum every time you go.

Rather than the current method of attracting people with one artist or one type of theme for an exhibit that already has to interest that specific individual. This way everytime you go it's like you are going to a new, quality museum, and you always know it is going to be different and entertaining. Everyone from everywhere gets to see everything whereas no one is going to come out of state to see some of the smaller (but still interesting) museums of Philadelphia because the museums don't have the marketing budget to reach those people nor the right amount of stuff to entertain them for a day trip. And don't forget under this format  taxpayer overhead for museums can be significantly lower.       

Now there could be many rebuttals to this idea of central city museums and how they don't create as many GDP dollars as the current setup, and I could defend that all day but I am sure I am already over 500 words.

How I am going to relate this to the readings:

I can somewhat see why Prof. Bruggeman assigned these readings. Tea time at Valley Forge was of the same era as the people painted in the Pearle paintings. Sitting in front of me, I have the article and a 1 1/2 pages of notes on it, but in reality the article was too in-depth for me.  I have a hard time making a solid connection between the article and the visit. Sure the article was about different museums like the Essex Institute and methods of displaying artifacts like the period room (invented by Francis Dole). But after 16 pages of disorganized facts I had a hard time relating it to anything. I know my Prof. disagrees and we discussed in class, but I did not learn the theme or the purpose of this article.

The second article "Public History and the study of memory", relates so much more to this museum visit. The purpose of this article was to show how we are supposed to view public history and how we collect and display these perceptions of past events. That correlates so well to this past museum visit because this museum was a museum of important or influential people of the past that were supposed to be remembered for their past. They were carefully selected by an individual to do so (not many individuals). It was great to see the accidental point of view of Pearle's time period. All of these individuals were WHITE and I mean white Christian males! They were all that mattered, they were all that was significant to display as a memory of the past. The museum was an interesting opposite to what the article shows how museums display public memory today. Screw Flanders

Philadelphia Museum of Art review

My trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art was more interesting and vast with information than I originally expected it to be.  I arrived there early around ten am. The rain and fog painted a gloomy picture of a massive building or should I say, monument. Not having my morning coffee, and having my now typical feeling of exhaustion, I coward at the thought of climbing the buildings front steps, so I went up the side near the parking area. The view of the city from the top of the stairs was breathtaking. It made you feel like you were on top of the city, and important in a sense. Once I got inside the interior was just as vast and pronounced as the exterior, it was large in what I am guessing to be Roman or Greek style, with massive pillars and columns and staircases everywhere I looked. The large wall hanging rugs made me feel like I was in a temple. You can tell that when the main building was built back in 1933, it was built to be the monument that withstands the tests of time.

Once I looked at the map, I jetted up to the second floor to where I thought my favorite exhibit would be; the Arms and Armor Gallery. I am not the artsy type in the least and have little appreciation for art but ancient swords, guns, and armor were right up my ally.

This room in the gallery really changed my expectation of memory. It made me realize that time periods where there were minimal technology had the means to build things to last unlike today. The attention to detail that went into every gun, sword, and plate of armor showed you the quality in materials they used, a quality that you would not find in a product of today’s standards.

You can tell that the way some of the works were displayed was in origin order. There was one glass case where there where several of the same style of black powder rifles and you can see each one was an improvement on the one before it either in style or performance design. I liked that the museum's setup was intuitive in that sense.

Another area that showed me similar ideals in exceeding my expectations of memory was the costume and textiles gallery. The reason this gallery was interesting to me is because it displayed pieces of clothing from hundreds of years ago up to the 21^st century so it was easy to make a comparison of products made today and similar products made in the past. In every case I saw something made 150 years ago was always better than something made after 1950 (the decade of the creation of disposable products). The attention to detail in the past and quality of materials far exceeds the products of today. I even saw a 200 year old servants coat that was more beautiful and made of better material that any item of clothing I have ever owned being a middle class white American. It was very interesting that the museums display of quality goods really changed my idea (the public’s idea) of what the technologies of the past truly are. The technologies of the distant past 

 are not as elementary as we thought them to be.

While I was on the first floor I also took a look at their new exhibit gallery which was currently displaying several painting of Rembrandt van Rijn. I knew that he was a famous painter from the 1600’s but I did not know much about his work. This exhibition made me realize how important he was. I could be wrong, but I believe in some of the literature I read it said that this was the first Rembrandt exhibition in Philadelphia since 1932 and that this exhibit reunited this series of paintings for the first time since 1656. I feel that I may have interpreted something wrong about this statement because it seems monumental (how fitting). If it is truly the case that this exhibition is the first time this series of paintings has been reunited since the 1600’s then that is nuts and I am honored to be able to say that I saw it. I feel like so many interesting and important historical exhibits go unnoticed in the city of Philadelphia, so it was amazing to see something like this.

As far as the rest of the museum goes, the format of the paintings and displays were much more informative than the Wager. Almost everything in there had a plaque with a name and a date. I was able to understand what I was seeing and the importance of it, and I think that was the main goal for the museum. To help visitors to understand the artwork and the importance or significance of it, whereas the Wagner was there to display power and significance beyond the public's understanding.

The Philadelphia museum of Art exceeded my expectations and understanding of memory. It was a great trip and I wouldn’t mind paying attention more often to when there is new exhibition in town.

The Wagner Institue

 I can safely say that the Wagner Institute is the coolest museum I have ever been to, and I've been to a lot of museums. It wasn't interactive, organized, or really that informative either. But the stuff in that museum not only took me back in time through its displays; it took me back to around 1850  through the museum itself. I think that it was a great example of what we have been reading in the text and discussing in class about how the museum building itself sometimes is the exhibit and the history being seen. In this case not only was the building original, the organization of the displays have been kept untouched to give you a view back in time of how museum culture was once looked at; sophisticated, complicated, and not for the lower class. That was an interesting aspect of the museum that I have never noticed before in other museums which directly relates to one of last week’s discussions about culture. Culture through the idea that since museums have been around, the majority of that time, the works inside them were meant to show off wealth and power and not to educate or be welcoming in anyway. The Wagner is one of the museums from the enlightenment period that was meant to educate the public! The interesting part about that is because it has been kept in its original organization, you can see the reflections of the past (sophistication, complication, confusion and the showing off of power) that shadow over the mission of the Wagner Institute which is to educate and share with the public. I am sure without seeing and analyzing a museum like that, most people today would of never have guessed the original culture of museums.


Don't get me wrong, the majority of my interests in the Wagner were the displays themselves. The old school cluttered style of arranging a variety of specimens from the biological world was intriguing and beautiful to me because I am a man of nature. If I could get away with it, I would be walking around naked all day chilling in the woods catching and viewing the animals and plants that make up our beautiful ecosystem. TMI....

Set up

Hey I just set up my blog.