Thursday, October 6, 2011

Penn Museum Review

Our visit to the Penn Museum was pretty boring, but much better than I would have expected for a university museum.  The museum was filled with 3 floors of interesting artifacts from 4,000 years ago up today. Artifacts from all across the world from Greek and Roman to Native American and African artifacts. Sounds great right? I was bored out of my skull!

I liked Independence hall and the Pearle paintings because it was theme focused materials that were directly related to economic history. Lessons of the past that we could use to pave our futures. Whats more important than our present and future?

I also liked the Wagner because it was all biology artifacts that a lot is still present in our world today. The museum was also focused on it's theme and short and sweet. The museum also gave a lesson about the past by the way that it's organization was preserved in time.

According to the text the original organizers of the Penn Museum wanted it to be a museum of art and natural sciences but somewhere along the way it became focused on archeology.

I didn;t like how the Penn Museum blurred its focus on Archeology much more than the other 2 museums with exhibits that didn't really relate well to the focus of the museum like the "fang!" exhibit about demythologizing vampires. Or the "Righteous Dope Fiend" exhibit about living on the street. I understand that both of these exhibit can be construed as contemporary archeology but I just think that they blurred the focus and theme of the museum.


One very important thing that I did learn at this museum was the purpose of this class.

I live my life to follow the money. If you follow the money, you can make money. Everything in politics as a special interest, a facade of doing something but really doing it for another reason altogether; and the reason always dwindles down to dollars and cents.

Prof. Bruggeman during the post museum discussion that museums all have facades and special interests in a way. They promote a theme or focus to the public for one reason but there is usually an underlying special interest, and that special interest is usually money.

Prof. Bruggeman also said that his goal by the end of this class is teach us how to follow the money in museums just by walking through them and observing your surrounds. I believe that special interest part of a museum is more interesting than any of it's contents. So with that being said I am excited to learn more, and I will keep an ear out about learning this skill from Prof. Bruggeman as time goes on.

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