Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Why is it a museum, not an art gallery?



Why is it Museum London? This question is so common that the museum has posted an answer online.

"Museum London is a multidisciplinary institution, housing and exhibiting works of historical art, contemporary art and historical artifacts. The term 'museum' provides a comprehensive description of what we do and references the artifacts we exhibit as well as both historical and contemporary art (i.e. Museum of Modern Art, New York). . . . The name was changed in 2001."

The museum likes to point out "the important historical aspect" of the organization. It presents itself as a guardian, if not "the" guardian, of great swaths of London history. Yet the history-oriented museum gets a lot of the history of its iconic building wrong—especially when it claims the original design of the building ignored its location at The Forks of the Thames.

Museum London brags that its current building, constructed in 1980, was designed by the renowned Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama. It was originally a deep, rich blue, a colour chosen to reflect its location at the historic forks location.

I attempted to get a photo showing the original appearance. I talked with a couple of people at the museum. When I mentioned the museum had originally been blue, they looked at me with complete surprise. Neither knew of any pictures showing a blue museum. It soon became clear that our guardian of local history knew very little about its own history, if a story going back less than four decades can be called history.

If Museum London wants to be an museum, it should act like one. It should address the changes made to Moriyama's creation and tell us why these changes, both big and small, were necessary.

2 comments:

William Kendall said...

William Kendall said...

I assume you were dealing with recent hires, because otherwise that lack of knowledge is troubling.

Rockinon said...

I actually had a chat with the fellow at the top and he claimed to have no idea that the original colour of Museum London building was blue. I'm going to look through my files and see if I can find even a small picture. If I do, the arches originally contained fan or pie slice shapes. When the blue panels were replaced with the grey ones, I believe corrosion was the reason, the active shapes in the arches disappeared.