Soliliquy
- Christopher R. Moore, Editor
I have enjoyed museums for a number of years now. When I lived in a town with the greatest density and quality of museums in the United States, New York City, I feel I was too young to appreciate and truly enjoy what resources, stimulations, and fulfillments I had at my nearest grasp. What can one expect from a five- or six-year old, with millions of people, alive, bustling about, buildings of diamond and silver shooting like rockets out of the ground, brushing blue onto their topmost edges, yellow taxi- cabs honking and squealing and squelching, suggestive of a chorus of mechanical sea-lions, their respective drivers yelling foreign verbiage at one another. In such a circumstance, at such an age and attention level, what are flat, static, plexiglass-enclosed pictures and artifacts in large, stuffy monuments to classical architecture? We can see things moving, speaking, playing, living. I might see a picture by some Piet Mondrian, or another of his contemporaries; I could think: lines! blocks of color! geometry! looks like what we did in class last thursday! Was it not appreciation, but rather a different appreciation? It matters little, as it did not interest me, to a great degree, as did other things in the fresh air. Those days are passed. Of course, I do not now have the key to the true wonder of all displayed pieces in all museums, but they certainly do hold a greater fascination factor than they did before. I now flourish within a quality museum. Certainly there are high and low quality museums, just like anything else. We live in a world of value (relative or not, a question for another inquiry), and as with everything else, museums that I've been to fall onto varying regions of the quality spectrum. I am not sure what factors are involved in a crummy gallery of exhibits in comparison to those in a spectacular one; the comparison seems subconscious. Regardless of the quality involved, or perhaps in spite of it, great buildings filled to the brim with artifacts honoring the imagination,