As a kid in grade school, I used to dread our annual field trip to Cleveland’s Museum of Natural History. Nothing but dead stuffed animals, old broken pottery and even older rocks. Dull. Murderously dull. At least the stupid art museum had suits of armor and swords and stuff–even if it was mainly full of paintings I couldn’t have cared less about.
But after I grew to a man and moved to Chicago, I put aside childish things–well, two or three of them, anyway.
And the Field Museum became one of my favorite places–especially on subzero weekday mornings when it was warm inside and I practically had it all to myself, as if it were my own vast, wonderful attic. On those days I felt like Uncle Scrooge, swimming in his dimes.
True, it was pretty dull, but that’s what I came to love about it. With what passes for regular life crashing and banging around me–all of us–most of the time, a good dose of dull was just what the doctor ordered.
My favorite was the old Bird Hall in the southwest corner of the main floor. It seemed the epitome of dull: Plain glass case after case full of dead birds, dusty and faded, in a huge, ill-lit room with wooden benches to sit on and quietly not think about much at all.
Heaven.
But no more.
In early October, I went to see the special exhibit of the fossil archaeopteryx, which, if you didn’t know, is what some scientists consider to be the vital link between dinosaurs and birds. It’s pretty dull itself, but sort of thrilling to a fallen Boy Paleontologist like me. I hadn’t been to the museum for a while, so afterward I decided to take a look at the new Dinosaur Hall on the second floor.
Ye gods! was my first thought on walking through the neon-trimmed door. Double ye gods! was my second, on seeing a TV set hanging in midair, tuned to a news team presenting a program of “news” from the dinosaur period. Bill Kurtis giving the news from 60 million years ago? And Steve Baskerville doing the weather? Triple ye gods!
Now, I’m sure this is a grabby new infotool, but it also exemplifies what I hate most about the trend toward Sesame-Streeting the Field Museum–and other museums around the country, for that matter.
I go to museums to get away from television. Museums are among the last peaceful refuges from it–or rather, they were.
But here in this exhibit devoted to life, not one but three or four of these android boxes jabbered away without surcease. And like electronic cockroaches, they–along with their cousins, interactive computer monitors–have invaded all of the newer exhibits.
I admit to being a techno-reactionary. When stereo came along, I thought it was an unnecessary frill. It took me a long time to trust cassette tapes, because they looked too little and flimsy to really work. I still call my computer a typewriter half the time. But it’s more than that.
In the last 10 years, the Field Museum–like so many others–has been striving mightily to become cute, engaging, eye-catching, clever, user-friendly. The recent permanent exhibits are like something Disney would come up with: Africaland, Egyptland, Dinosaurland.
Can Buddhaland be far behind?
The trouble with this is that in so doing, they have lowered the museum’s IQ.
A staffer I talked to said that today there are significantly fewer objects on display than there used to be. Also, creating some of these new exhibits required destroying priceless and irreplaceable dioramas in the Plant and Bird Halls–all in the name of progress.
They’ve also given in to the ever-decreasing attention span that has brought us USA Today, shorter and shorter articles in every magazine you pick up, and “Sesame Street,” to name just a few. The new exhibits are all ZIP! POP! BAM!
Now, I bow to none in my love for Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, but “Sesame Street” is for kids–and that’s the direction the museum has been heading for some time now. I also bow to none in my love of kids, having three of my own, but I’m not at all sure that an important scientific institution should be targeted at keeping 6th graders on field trips from nodding off. Nice for them, certainly, but for those of us who like our science, well, dull, it’s sort of like watching “Beakman’s World” instead of reading Scientific American.
The good news is that they haven’t quite succeeded in Sesame-Streeting the whole museum yet. There are still a few pockets of fine, quiet, old-fashioned dull left.
The exhibits of Chinese tapestries, for instance, are still nicely boring if you’re not already into them. And the Plant Hall, with its exquisite life-size model specimens, isn’t boring at all, but it is a throwback to when the exhibits were quiet and serene, and didn’t shout at you.
But I guess my favorite remainder of the dull old days is what’s left of the Large Animal Hall on the west side of the main floor. Half of the original has been turned into an exhibit they’re calling “Messages From The Wilderness.”
“Hello, I’m a spotted owl and I’m a vanishing species.”
But the other half remains as it was 30 years ago, when I first started visiting the museum. Its tranquil displays and dioramas of stuffed dead animals are still in an ill-lit hall, with the last of those handsome old oak benches here and there.
If on some freezing winter morning, you see someone sitting on one of those old oak benches, peacefully staring at the water buffalo or the family of deer forever frozen in a single moment, that’s me, thinking about nothing at all.
