New Literalism Comes for Museums | Hacker News Reader

New Literalism Comes for Museums

jaymollica.com

17 pointsthebigship9 comments

Dumbing down of science museums happened decades ago. The Smithsonian, the Henry Ford Museum, and the Science Museum in London were made more "accessible". They used to focus on historically significant artifacts, without much explanation. Then they switched to heavy explanation of the basics.

The Science Museum in London still had Maudslay's lathe on display. Maudslay's lathe is the direct ancestor of all modern lathes, with its slide rest and the leadscrew drive. No previous lathe was like that. So it's one of those rare artifacts that changed the world. People walk by it to get to see James Bond's car. That was the strength of that museum - they had some of the first examples of key advances.

The Henry Ford Museum used to have really obscure items. "Capacitor, Cornell-Dublier, 1938". A combination television camera and kinescope projector for rotating disk television. Then they added explanatory exhibits and pushed aside the small obscure stuff. That was probably for the best; it was like a really well funded antique shop. The kids just want to see the locomotives, anyway.

The Smithsonian was once called "The Nation's Attic". Now, most of the obscure stuff has been moved out to storage in favor of more understandable exhibits. They used to have a history of clock escapements, with a working model of each type, kept wound and running. No more. The Arts and Industries Building had even older stuff. Their stamp collection had examples of all US stamps.

The lathe is on display right now.

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co46284...

> One of those rare artifacts that changed the world.

It's so enriching to see one of these artifacts - I don't think it's quite possible to understand the feeling without seeing one of them in real life.

A really memorable moment was stubmling across the two oldest surviving printing presses at a small museum in Antwerp - [the Plantin-Moretus museum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantin%E2%80%93Moretus_Museum).

Everybody strolled right by it - for me, just looking at it made me feel more connected to the history of the written word.

I think you would appreciate Munich's science museum (https://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/museum-island/visit). They've done a solid job of balancing accessibility and hard science, and updating many of the old models and displays from the last century, including the wing devoted to bridge building.

I spent a good 45 minutes drinking in the exhibits around hydropower generation. And who doesn't appreciate a cutaway section of one of the first Airbus jetliners? https://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/museum-island/exhibitions...

Museums have come to rely on KAWS as a bankable artist whose unabashed merchandising is integral to the experience

Exit Through the Gift Shop remains integral to our moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop

This is not the way I use literal or literalism. Is this real industry jargon or something he made up. I think I've previously something similar described in the "death of nuance."

I see some folks are taking issue with the word "literalism." The the term "New Literalism" is coined in the linked article[0] as such:

"When I say literalism, I don't mean realistic or plainly literal. I mean literalist, as when we say something is on the nose or heavy-handed, that it hammers away at us or beats a dead horse. As these phrases imply, to re-state the screamingly obvious does a kind of violence to art. "A point is still a point!""

Hope this is helpful.

[0]https://www.newyorker.com/culture/critics-notebook/the-new-l...

I think it is used sort of the same way that fundamentalist Christians take the Bible "literally", as in, there's just the literal meaning of the words, no deeper symbolic meaning, usage of literary themes, allusions, etc. Fundamentalism also has a similar aversion to nuance. If you conceive of much of the world as driven by tensions between two opposites, fundamentalism chops off one of the ends. So for example, you have a tension between a subjective meaning (symbols, themes, allusions, etc.) and the objective meaning ("literal" meaning). As the late Rabbi Sacks observed, often the subjective meaning of the text runs counter to the objective meaning, and that counter- tension results in much deeper meanings than either alone.

I think he is observing that we live in a fundamentalist age. By "fundamentalist" I mean "there's one right answer", that is, no nuance. Even on the political Left, where you normally find some nuance, you get a fundamentalism that requires interpreting everything through an oppressor/victim lens that assigns groups to one or the other. So Palestinians are "victim", despite the fact that the Muslim view of homosexuality would be categorized "oppressive". White people are "oppressor" because they enslaved people, despite the fact that young white men died by the hundreds of thousands in a war to end slavery, and that the British Empire ended slavery in the Ottoman Empire by refusing to trade with them if they continued slavery.

The author is confusing literalism with superficiality, and I don't understand why.

For example, Hans Haacke had a piece which was literally documenting the provenance of a museum's Manet painting to reveal a connection between the donor and the Nazis. That's literal, but I hope most here would think it's not at all superficial.

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