In which I think of new forms of exhibits

This week in museology we've been reading about exhibits - who is listening and looking (students? the upper class? the 'public'?), who is talking (curators? designers? educators?), the problems with interpretation, the concerns with 'blockbusters', the ethical questions that need to be thought through. "Museums are not museums without exhibitions", writes Kathleen McLean, and they are "the soul of a museum experience". I thought I would share with you, readers, a very interesting exhibit I saw recently: the Met's The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions.

This was a very strange exhibit for me, especially as a public history student. Traditionally exhibits are thought of as visually appealing, 3-D versions of an academic paper, in the way that there is a thesis, and objects are used to illustrate this idea. We are used to exhibits talking about one historical subject, perhaps two; but this exhibit was very different.

Philippe de Montebello was the director of the Met until his recent retirement. His 30+ year influence, as well as the respect given to him by his colleagues, is obvious. The show really is a celebration of his time at the museum, and it was well-advertised; the Met's Special Exhibition podcast had been doing shows about the objects featured in the exhibit for months.

This exhibit was not on one historical topic, nor did it centre on one historical era or country, and it didn't talk about a certain art movement. Th exhibit featured the Met's most important acquisitions over the past thirty years, most important being defined in this case as the most transformative to its collections. As the exhibit website describes, it is a celebration of the diversity of the museum's collection. Three hundred objects were placed in the gallery's largest exhibition space, and in it was created "an explosive kaleidoscope of works in various materials representing artistic traditions that range across the globe and across time".

The show was organized in a completely different way than a usual art gallery. The objects were organized solely by acquisition date, meaning that a visitor moved from an 18th century French dress, to a 4th century BC Egyptian figure, to a 14th century Burgundian deck of cards, to a 5th century Indian Buddha, to a Sienese medieval painting, to a picture of Marilyn Monroe. The artifacts spanned thousands of years, hundreds of countries (even Easter Island), and included everything from famous painters (Rembrandt, Picasso, van Gogh) to little-known 19th century photography, from clothing to quilts, from pistols to armour.

Walking through the exhibit was slightly overwhelming. I'd never seen an exhibit that literally centred around acquisitions and ignored any sort of thematic organization. But I, as well as my father who was with me, both agreed it was a new and wonderful way to see the objects. There was no attempt to relate the objects to one another; the accompanying text panels spoke only of the individual artifact. The exhibit let the visitors make their own connections between the objects, between styles, between countries, between eras. It also did a great job at illustrating the sheer size of a world-class art museum like the Met, whose collections mandate must be very long indeed.

While it might seem counterintuitive for curators to put together a large exhibit without a historical (or artistic) theme and which had no prescribed learned message for visitors, this sort of exhibit still worked. It let visitors see objects that had never been displayed together in the same room, allowing for new meanings to come out of the objects. It broke traditional museum rules and moved some of the interpretation from the curators to the visitors. Overall it celebrated the efforts of a single man, who helped the Met become one of the most important art museums in the world.