On Thursday, we started the day with a meeting with Laura and Kerry. We ironed out the details of data input and what we'd be doing for the rest of the summer. Dani and I made a list of every object and prompt in the exhibit and numbered the cases so our spreadsheets would have the same basic structure. We also decided to each do one set of tracking maps: they took the maps for June and I took the ones for July. June and July were going to have to be separate anyways because of the new ArtSplash activities and the different behaviors we tracked.
At 2 PM, we led a tour of the exhibit for the Penn interns! I thought it was really interesting how overwhelmingly positive all the interns were about the exhibit. They thought it was interesting that the works were displayed as valuable works of art that mattered, which was contrasted with the Penn's exhibit, which feels like an afterthought. A few of them noted the vastly different use of lighting and color in Look Again, which has always been one of my favorite aspects of the exhibit as well. They liked that there was more space for individual objects and visitors could walk around them to see them from many angles.
Their positivity was interesting at first, but it started to get frustrating when it began to feel as though none of them were willing to critically engage with the exhibit. Stephanie was asking some pretty leading questions, and the same voices kept jumping into the conversation to defend the exhibit. A few things they said were particularly amusing to me in light of all of the conversations we've been having this summer: someone said that art museums don't create a narrative about a progression of art, and another intern said that she thought that the technique "works really well for objects, but I don't know about art." Some of the things Stephanie was asking were really intriguing to me, like when she took the narrative of progression statement and asked why the timeline isn't applied to the ethnographic arts, and whether it is the job of the curator to draw connections and individualize time periods/styles/groups within the greater idea of Africa. I was shocked that none of them had any issue with the amount of information provided in the exhibit, except for one intern (maybe two, it's difficult to hear on the tape) who wished for maps. They all gave the "oh, it's an art museum" excuse we've been hearing all summer, without stopping to complicate what it means to be an art museum. Only two interns agreed to be interviewed, which was also frustrating. They all seemed to be so bowled over by the atmosphere of the museum that they didn't really want to engage. The few critiques that were voiced were very helpful, though.
That evening, we went to Monique's to watch the Barnes documentary! I feel like I still have a lot of questions about how the Barnes Foundation operated as an educational institution (who they let in, what they taught, etc), how their education program runs now (is it at all faithful to Barnes' vision?), and how the "public" is defined (for Barnes, for the people who moved it to the city, etc). It was a really fascinating glimpse into the museum politics of the city, and I've caught myself rolling my eyes at the Annenberg name when I see it all over Philadelphia.
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