A Day at the Museum; or, Nightmare Visions of a Neoliberal Dystopia

Know your betters!

I've been to a bunch of science museums in the past few years, and there a few things I've noticed they have in common, from the Museum of Science in Boston to the Copernicus Science Center in Warsaw. The blocks of parked school buses outside, the huge school groups running around paying attention to seemingly everything but the museum, the well-meaning interactive exhibits. Usually these places get me thinking a lot about museum-craft, pedagogy, and the value of a practical education. But the American Museum of Natural History in New York was the only place where I also had to think about about life in the new Babylon at the heart of American neoliberal empire (yea, I'm always this fun).

I ought to admit that I'm a little wrong-footed at science museums. I can talk my way through a day at any art museum on earth with daughter, but a science museum requires a different skill set. They have a ruthless pedagogic drive that usually takes professional help to get the most out of. It doesn't matter how interesting, colorful, or interactive the exhibit on, say, the upper atmosphere of Neptune may be, because by the time you explain it your kid is likely to have already moved on to the next interesting, colorful, and interactive exhibit in view. But I do admire the way curators and designers consciously try to make sure the exhibits exist on several levels at once. You can enjoy checking out the fossilized dinosaur skeletons without meticulously following how the galleries are arranged like a cladogram to explain to you natural selection.

AMNH does a lot of things very well, but there are other things hanging around on inertia. The extensive animal habitat dioramas, for example, must be kept up solely for retro-chic reasons, for appearing on episodes of Mad Men and such. Because for teaching kids about wildlife, they're useless. I didn't see anyone paying them any attention whatsoever. If you want to teach a kid about impalas, you can show them a YouTube video, which would offer a richer experience without the uncomfortable questions about why the animals in front of you had to be killed. Same goes, roughly, for the ethnographic exhibits, which try hard, but look neglected and threadbare (though thankfully, no one is stuffed).

But the thing most on my mind, which grabbed my brain and wouldn't let go, is just how expensive the place is. I mean, really, really expensive. Like, your heart skips when you realize the general admission fee is serious, and your heart stops when you realize that doesn't include each separate special exhibition. That, like, prepackaged tuna salad on white bread sandwiches in the cafeteria cost $9.50.

I spent a lot of time trying decide whether this reflects or shapes our new economic reality. For the very wealthy — no shortage of them in Manhattan, and I saw many of their offspring with their nannies passing the day there — the cost is nothing to worry about. For middle class families, especially those from out of the area who can't be enticed to buy an annual membership — that is, me! — the cost is a sharp, stabbing pain that you try to reason away as a one-time, educationally valuable treat. For the less well off, presumably many of those kids from the outer boroughs who appeared on all those buses, it is something you do with your school one day, and you're so keyed up about not being in a school building and spring is in the air and your hormones are short-circuiting, you probably don't notice much. And for every other day of your life, the place is completely invisible and irrelevant.

I'm sure the museum would argue that the reason for such expense is because of all the awesome things they do. Sure they raise funds from rich people — all the time in fact! But it's never enough, and some of those costs have to be passed on. But they'd rather not talk about alternatives, because it would be awkward to raise the issue of whether or not making nice things like this publicly available to a wide number of people might just be the reason we pay taxes. That funding educational missions like this ought to be one of the fundamental things we have a government for. But, that's crazy liberal talk.

The worst part is that after having spent a heart-sinking amount of money, you are frequently reminded how much the experience "is made possible" by the incredible generosity and decency of folks like David H. Koch. For some mysterious reason, this plutocrat throws some cash to museums, though he throws much more into electing mouth-breathing ninnies to public office who think Adam and Eve ate those dinosaurs, and the bones might have been put in the earth because Jesus wanted to test our faith. Educating the unwashed doesn't motivate him as much as buying the kind of political power that ensures the existing power structure remains well in tact. That he remains obscenely wealthy, and no one asks dangerous questions about the allocation of our resources and what might be called out "common wealth."

The purpose of a museum of natural history may not be to question whether feudalism is a viable socio-political model for the 21st century, but if you think too hard, it teaches us a valuable lesson from natural history, that life is mean, selfish, and unfair.