It's satisfying when somebody says exactly what you might have written, and perhaps says it - perish the thought! - even better. It saves the blogger (me) a lot of work!
I find that Steven Pearlstein is frequently such a writer. So I ask that you consider his item ("Why Not A Museum for American Ingenuity?"). It was occasioned by this week's groundbreaking for the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington DC, but its subtext is what Congressman James Moran has called the "balkanization" of our national museums.
Indeed, the idea of having different museums for different segments of our population screams out for correction (see Morning Fog, or public architecture critic Philip Kennicott - and the new Director of the NMAAHC proclaims, in the same newspaper, has a me-too moment -- says that he doesn't want to create a museum just for African-Americans. It makes even less sense to infuse our national museum system with segregation just as our people vote with their feet and hearts to move toward integration -- latest reports indicate that the rate of marriages across racial lines is growing at an accelerated rate.
Yet it's gone too far to stop, I fear. The bandwagon of cultural particularism is rolling down the slope, out of control, and will inevitably lead to the splintering of museums' foci, just as our pop music, once a single broad category, got separated into country/western, r&b, soul, new age, hiphop and other niche-oriented categories.
The only hope is that, with all these museums (except the Holocaust Museum) under the Smithsonian Institution, sense will prevail. The SI powers-that-be will see the separation, the duplication, the failure of this cluster of museums as a whole to present a varied, coherent reflection on our history, and will reorganize to do something about it.
In about 100 years.
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