A Guide to Hamilton in New York City Museums

Hamilton Bobblehead, Hamilton Grange National Memorial
$24.95

Alexander Hamilton.  Bastard.  Orphan.  Son of a whore and a Scotsman.  New York’s immigrant Founding Father.  The ten dollar hero and scholar. From the Caribbean island of Nevis originally, came to New York to attend King’s College (now Columbia University).  Died too young.  Never president, but who wants to be president anyway? 

As another man of humble, tropical island origins who escaped to New York–to A.Ham’s alma mater no less– I’ve always found him relatable.  Thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s insanely great Broadway musical, many others now do too. Continue reading “A Guide to Hamilton in New York City Museums”

Some Thoughts on Museum-Speak

Museum SpeakHaving passed the milestone of fifty museums reviewed a few weeks back, I’m beginning to have a sense of some general patterns and tendencies, both in museums themselves and in what I like (or dislike) about them. One thing that I’ve become increasingly conscious of is the peculiar language of museum-speak: the way curators write descriptions of art or artifacts.

The Tyranny of the Text

Wall texts are (almost) inescapable in modern museums.  That’s good and bad.  It’s indisputably valuable to get filled in on what you’re looking at, and much contemporary art is incomprehensible without an explanation of some sort.  And yet, sometimes I feel I’d be freer and happier without the inescapable words on the wall.  

One of the things I love about the Frick is the lack of wall texts in the permanent collection (they do succumb to using them for temporary shows).  Visitors see the art with no more than the artist and title of the work discreetly on the frame. You have to spring for a book or pick up a free audio guide if you want descriptions and context. It’s refreshing.

Exceptional cases like that aside, virtually any museum visit involves reading the walls. And art people use a standardized and specialized language that is erudite, sometimes to the point of pretentiousness, and makes significant assumptions of the reader’s baseline knowledge.

As a highly educated, privileged person, that works fine for me.  Generally museum-speak is not badly written, but frequently verbose and annoyingly stilted.  But in visiting populist museums like BRIC, El Museo del Barrio, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts (places I think of as “starter museums”), I’ve noticed that even while they are trying to reach a different audience, they usually adhere to museum-speak, a language that may not be terribly welcoming or useful to their target audiences.

Examples

Along with taking notes, I’ve been snapping pictures of wall texts as an aide-mémoire (I can be pretentious too).  That provides a bunch of text from which to draw examples.  The following, chosen pretty much at random, are pretty typical.
From El Museo:  Catalina Chervin, Songs 16 from the portfolio Canto

Inspired by artists driven by emotions like the post-impressionists, Catalina Chervin found a way of conveying this through expressionist prints.  In her own words, her work is a “manner of thinking that involves the emotions.  It is the most truthful part of my inner self.   It is like walking round the ‘edge’ of the universe that I can find only when I am working.”  The Canto portfolio is a group of images that serve as illustration for Canta! by the Jewish poet, playwright, and Auschwitz victim Itzhak Katzenelson.  The images are a mix of hard and soft ground etching, with Chervin’s signature abstract style rendered with a powerful, expressive line.

From Brooklyn:  James Hamilton, The Last Days of Pompeii

The devastation of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. was an object of popular fascination in the mid-eighteenth century.  At that time the volcano began a sustained period of renewed activity.  Simultaneously, archaeologists began excavations of the ancient buried city. The theme appealed greatly to Romantic painters on both sides of the Atlantic.  European by birth, James Hamilton had a taste for the philosophical concept of the Sublime and an obsession with the cyclical nature of societies and civilizations.  He applied these interests to the Roman Empire in The Last Days of Pompeii.”

From the Bronx, Rocio Garcia, La Nieve (The Snow), “The paintings of Rocio

Garcia employs a cinematographic sensibility to narratives tinged with sexuality, violence and eroticism.  After returning to Havana from her studies at the Repin Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, Russia in the 1980s, Garcia embarked on a series of works that focuses on challenging the stereotyped options of womanhood and the female figure, as well as masculinity and homosexuality.  [more description omitted]

None of these is terrible writing (though equally none of them is great).  But all could be rewritten to be more active, more concise.  Caption writers could help someone who doesn’t know what “expressionist” means or who the post-impressionists were, who might find it easier to understand “the volcano started erupting regularly” as opposed to “sustained period of renewed activity,” or who would get “like the movies” but might have trouble saying, much less understanding, “cinematographic.”

Improving Museum-Speak

I have some concrete suggestions for how to make this better, and one thing to avoid.

The thing not to do is deploy multiple wall texts.  It’s condescending and unhelpful to have a high-falutin’ text and an “average person” text.  To say nothing of taking up too much space on the wall. Though sometimes separate kids’ captions are a good idea.  

Electronic screens would change this. I haven’t reviewed the Museum of Math yet, but their exhibits are all accompanied by onscreen descriptions, and a visitor can choose basic, intermediate, or math-genius levels of detail.  That’s impractical for many museums, but still an instructive example of a way to serve different audiences well.

Starter museums in particular should aim squarely at the average person with the text on the wall.  Make a cognoscenti version available in an app, or an audio guide, or some other, unobtrusive place.

Anyone writing museum wall texts should own a copy of Strunk & White, but also Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer, in which he describes complex concepts using a vocabulary limited to the 1,000 most commonly used English words.  It’s a sure antidote to stilted text.  I’m not saying limit museum captions to that vocabulary; they’d sound ridiculous.  But it does concretely show that it’s possible to express complex ideas in even the simplest language.

I also think wall texts should deploy bullets and questions to succinctly make points and engage the reader.  All professional writing is going in that direction, and while some writers use those techniques badly or lazily, that doesn’t make it wrong.

Some places write captions pretty well.  Brooklyn’s Egyptian installation focuses partially around topics, both sacred and mundane.  Here’s a sample: 

The Ancient Egyptians believed that personal grooming was an essential part of good health and sexual attractiveness.  Men and women shaved their body hair and cut the hair on their heads very short or shaved it completely as a precaution against lice.  They donned voluminous wigs to signal heightened sexual interest.  Eye makeup such as kohl not only protected against sun glare–much like the lampblack used by modern football players–but also emphasized the eyes’ size, shape, and natural allure…

You get the main point right away, and you learn something about the ancient Egyptians as human beings, relatable to both running backs and drag queens.  

Although I like that phrasing even better.

All museums, even the high-end ones, would benefit from using more everyday language on their walls. As I’ve read a lot of wall text the past two months, I know I’d find it refreshing.

In addition to broader U.S. audiences, international visitors would benefit as well. I recently experienced that in reverse. I studied Japanese as an undergrad and lived there for a year.  My language skills are currently rusty to say the least.  But when I visited last fall, I discovered that I could pretty much read the kid-level museum captions. They were a great help when I visited places that didn’t feature a lot of English explanation.

Avoiding museum-speak might seem a small thing among all the other things museums are doing to attract broader audiences. But I believe it would have an outsized impact as museums preach and practice greater inclusiveness.

The Museum Project: Milestone I

I’m now 50 museums into my project.  140-ish to go. That’s 26% of the way, for those keeping score.

Some other fun facts and figures:

Money Spent $94.00
Time Spent (actual museum time, does not include travel or writing) 47h, 53m
Average Edification (out of 5) 3.10
Average Entertainment (out of 5) 2.94
Average Enthusiasm (which is what I should’ve been calling the “should you go?” rating) (out of 5) 3.38
Average Time Spent per Museum 57m 28s

Time and Money Redux

I’ve been careful with the money so far — taking advantage of free days, my IDNYC card, and friends with guest privileges. 

Practically two entire days of my life spent at museums since I started doing this. I’m glad I’m tracking that. It beats spending that time on line at Trader Joe’s.

Also in terms of time, I recall with chagrin a planning post where I wrote some crazy nonsense like “I’ll visit 20 museums per week” or something.  What a naive fool I was!  I posted Hamilton Grange on 3 March, 58 days ago.  That means my true pace is 0.86 museum per day.  If I keep it up it’ll take about 165 more days before I’m done.  Daunting!

But it has been a ton of fun so far.  I have gone places I would never have gone otherwise, many of which I will happily visit again.  There have really been only a few where I felt my time was not well spent.  So, onward, I’m sure there will be 50 more done before I know it.

Here’s an updated map:  museums added since v1 in green, museums removed (due to closure) in red, and visited museums in purple:

Status Update

  • Total museums visited over my life in New York City: 80.
  • Total museums in New York City:  190
  • Percentage complete:  40%
  • Museum entries to date:  21
  • Changes:  Removed the Hispanic Society (closed ’til 2019 alas!); added the Judd Museum, the Museum of Food and Drink, and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

Rules of the Road

Finally it’s time to establish the ground rules for this project.  What am I doing and what am I going to get out of it, and what do I need to track?

Let’s start with the point of a museum in the first place.  There are two threads going back to their earliest days.  

Entertainment.  Think Barnum’s American Museum, the ancestor of Madame Tussaud’s.  The “dime museum” tradition.  

 

Edification. Giving the huddled masses a chance to see beautiful or interesting things and learn about the wider world was viewed as a civic good by many of the industrialists whose collections and money launched the great museums of the city in the mid-nineteenth century. The Met was founded on the idea that a museum should (quoting the Encyclopedia of the City of New York’s entry on museums) “promote education and social and moral betterment.”

I’ll avoid the arguments ongoing about how museums are changing their missions and programming in reckless pursuit of a shifting balance between entertainment and edification.  In an ideal world a museum should do both.

So my plan is to offer a brief summary of my experience with each place I visit here, with a standardized rating system of from zero to five Old Met Logo Pins assessing (in my opinion):

  • How edifying the museum is — how much better am I as a person for visiting;
  • How entertaining it is — how much fun I had; and
  • How much I think everyone should visit.I considered other more complicated rubrics but that seems sufficient.  And I’m going to try not to judge museums against one another.  It’s not like the Met is the Platonic Ideal and all others can get at most 4 stars. I’ll try to assess each against its own mission statement, large or small.

    I’ll also note how much time I spent at each place, and list the single best thing I saw or learned.  And anything else noteworthy that happened along the way.

    I’ve also given some thought to order. As I was first thinking about doing this, the most OCD part of my brain thought that it should be done in alphabetical order.  That is emphatically not going to happen.  It won’t even be alphabetical by borough.  I am putting together a project plan that groups museums by proximity, opening hours/times, and likely visit durations to make things more efficient and give me roadmap.  For my own interest and sanity, I’ll mix it up a bit. Do some of the far-flung ones, but follow that up with a chunk of Manhattan.  I’ll tag posts by borough, neighborhood, and type of museum for sort-ability.

    One more thing.  After much thought, I have decided that if I’ve visited a museum in the past six months, I get a pass on going anew.  I’ll of course write about them here, based on my memory of the visit.

Let the games begin!

Time and Money

As my plans evolve, the next thing to consider is exactly how much time and money this project will entail.  I’m on a bit of a budget these days, and visiting all 188 (and likely a few more) museums sounds like a spendy project.

Let’s think about time first.  At a very rough guess, I expect I will spend four days a week on this project, and let’s say I can manage to visit 4-5 museums a day.  On some days, particularly in the dense zones like the “Museum Mile” stretch of Fifth Avenue I’ll probably manage more than that.  But on average, just to give myself a sense of timing, I think those are reasonable estimates.  Doing the math yields a range of 9-12 weeks.  That’s a lot, and a lot of museums in a short amount of time. But it’s not, like, a lifetime.  And I’m giving myself plenty of days off.

On the money front, I have to confess when I was doing the list cleanup last week, I didn’t pay very close attention to admission fees.  But a lot of the places on the list are free.  Happily I’m a member at most of the big institutions—the Met, the Frick, MoMA.  That will save some money.  But I do want a sense of budget.  I’m going to start with a sense that about 40% of the places on the list are free, and the remaining 60% charge an average of $8.  That’s, um, huh.  That’s about $900.  Okay.  Sometimes math is not my friend, exactly, but it’s better to have a budget up front than to be surprised at the end.  I’m going to hope I’m overestimating somehow.  And find free or pay-what-you-will days for as many places as I can.  It’ll be interesting to see how the accounting does work out.

And, in a brainstorm, I will get an IDNYC card, which includes free admission or membership to 44 cultural institutions. (It’s really a great deal, highly recommend the small amount of time investment required to anyone who lives in New York.) I just need to actually get the card in the mail and I’m good to go.

New York Museum Statistics: An Analysis and a Map

The great thing about having a spreadsheet with every museum in the city on it is it opens the door to all kinds of analysis!  At least, that’s the great thing about it if you’re me.  Museum statistics may not be your cup of tea, but I’ve culled some hopefully interesting findings from the data on where New York’s museums are and what they cover.  

My first question was, of the 188 museums and cultural institutions currently open in New York City, how many have I visited?  As of the start of the Museum Project, I had visited 62 of the of places on the list, which works out to just about one-third of them.  I feel bad about that. I wish it were higher. What have I been doing with my time in New York? But truth be told, it’s about where I expected.

I also wondered about location.  I’d expect museums to be concentrated in Manhattan, with relatively fewer in the outer boroughs.  Was I right?

Museum Statistics:  New York Museums By Borough

The short answer is yes.  115 of the museums, or 61%, are in Manhattan.  Brooklyn has 23 and Queens has 22, almost a tie (and about 12% apiece), The Bronx has 15, and Staten Island has 12. And there’s one museum, the Filipino American Museum, that does not have permanent space, but somewhat to my surprise it DOES have an exhibit going on that one can visit.  For my next trick, I created a (daunting!) Google map, which took some time but which I decided would be invaluable for planning purposes.

The other thing that my museum statistics database facilitates is a look the types of museums the city boasts.  The Wiki list helpfully categorized them and a spot check suggests it works at least for a high level overview. 

Museum Statistics:  New York Museums by Type or Theme

In short, art.  Lots of art.  70, or about 37%, of the museums in New York City deal with art.  (that includes the 2-3 “encyclopedic” museums, most notably Brooklyn and the Met).  

History comes next.  I’ll be visiting 27 historic houses or other buildings, and  the list encompasses 21 history museums of other sorts.  Cumulatively, that’s about 25% of the total.  

Not exclusive with either art or history, this project will also be good for my knowledge of Jewish art and culture.  Having lived in this city for more than half my life, I like to think I’m just a little bit Jewish by osmosis, but the 9 Jewish museums in New York will be a good reinforcement of that.  

One sobering note, for me at least, is the paucity of science museums.  My database categorizes only 4 museums in New York as either “science” or “natural history.”  One might count the Intrepid or some of the maritime museums in the science category. And of course the American Museum of Natural History is so good at what it does, it could count for 5 “normal” science museums. 

But the market might well support five normal science museums, where we have only one AMNH. Now I understand why the crowds descend on weekends. I believe there’s a market opportunity if anyone wants to open another science museum.  As opposed to another gallery or art museum, of which we have more than plenty.

Finally, jumping back to other cultural institutions, I note that New York City has specialist museums devoted to the following cultures:
African and African American:  7
Hispanic/Latino:  4
Tibetan: 3
Ukrainian: 2
Korean: 2
Chinese: 2
Italian: 2
Japan: 1
Germany: 1
Czech: 1
Swiss: 1
Scandinavian: 1
Native American: 1
Filipino American:  1

Rather than rattle down any more numbers, I’ll close this post by posing myself two questions (and then answering them):

What am I most excited about? 

What am I least excited about?

As a slightly dark individual, I do love the opportunity to visit what you might call the goth museum trifecta:  Green-Wood Cemetery, the Edgar Allan Poe House and the Morbid Anatomy Museum.  But I’ve been to all of them.

In terms of places I’ve never been, I have been meaning to go see the Hall of Fame of Great Americans in the Bronx for ages, and the Hispanic Society probably has the most important art collection of the places on the list that I’ve never been to. Somehow I’ve never been to Gracie Mansion, it will be good to finally take that tour.  And Louis Armstrong’s house!  The Nicolas Roerich Museum is literally three blocks from me, and I’ve never been there.  In short, there’s a lot I’m really looking forward to.

In terms of the “dread” end of the spectrum, well, the Times Square museums rank pretty low for me.  I’ve avoided Madame Tussaud’s and Ripley’s Believe it or Not for years, but their day will come during this project.  I’m not super excited about the Caruso Museum, though I expect it will be charming and I do like opera.  And I can’t say I’m looking forward to the City’s three museums devoted to 9/11.  They are hard places to visit, emotionally.

Counting Museums: Building the Museum Project Database

Met Button - RedThere are eight million stories in the naked city.  How many museums are there?  Counting museums posed some challenges, largely related to locating online lists and assessing their accuracy.

I started with NY.com, a central tourist reference for all things related to the city.  It lists 91 as of mid-February 2017.  That is, I was sure, way too low.

Yelp, when I searched for “museum” and New York, NY, generated a list of 774 entries.  I worried for a moment that perhaps I’d bitten off more than I can chew. But a quick scan of some of their results shows museums in Montclair and Jersey City, and my first rule here is New York only.  And it also showed a lot of commercial art galleries. The line between a gallery and a museum is   blurry, I’ll admit.  But just about all commercial galleries are outside my project.  Having no practical way to weed down 774 entries, I decided to look elsewhere.

Foursquare listed a disappointing 90 total, which I realized was even more disappointing than it sounded, since individual bits of the American Museum of Natural History got listed separately, like the Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites and the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples.  So that’s hardly an accurate count.

Finally, with reluctance, I turned to the place I probably should have looked first, Wikipedia.  Wikipedia’s “List of Museums and Cultural Institutions in New York City” had 213 institutions listed on it as of mid-February 2017.  That seemed reasonable, and “felt” like a good number, at least to start with.

But as with so much on Wikipedia, I knew I couldn’t just take this list at face value.  I’d have to clean it up, remove places that have closed or where never really exhibit spaces, and (harder task) add any that I could catch that were missing.  So that’s what I spent a chunk of a day doing. 

27 museums on Wikipedia’s list aren’t currently open for business.  

  • Some, like the Mets Museum (not to be confused with the Met Museum) and Governor’s Island are open at certain times of the year (like baseball season).  
  • Some are closed in between exhibitions, they’ll be open again at some point.  
  • Some are defunct, including, sadly, Staten Island’s Tattoo Museum, which I was excited about.
  • Some were never really museums, being more performing arts spaces, or curators of educational materials that get lent out or travel around, like the Toy Museum (another one I’m bummed about removing from the list).
  • And some are from the future, like the Culture Shed, which is scheduled to open in 2019.

I opted to err on the side of leaving places on the list, even if I wasn’t 100% sure they should count.  For example, I’ve left the two botanical gardens, and Green-Wood Cemetery (though Woodlawn’s not on the list, and I didn’t add it). On the other hand, I have added two museum to the Wikipedia list.  First, the Met:Breuer.  The Met’s takeover of the former Whitney Building is terrific, and if the Cloisters counts separately, so should the Breuer. And second, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling in Harlem.

Adding and subtracting gives the answer to the question.  At the moment, there are 188 museums in the naked city.  And I’m making it my mission to visit all of them.

Introduction: All the Museums in New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, With SnowSitting in the subterranean cafeteria of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a snowy day two weeks ago, I found myself pondering the phenomenon of the museum.  The Met is one of my favorite places in the world.  I love wandering through the halls, my mental map of the museum having long since obviated any need for a physical or virtual one.  I could probably guesstimate how many hours I’ve spent therein over two decades as a New Yorker. But rather than do any numerical prestidigitation I’ll just say “a lot.”  And I thought also about how the museums of the city are one of the best things about it, how they’ve enriched my life immeasurably and how they collectively constitute a primary reason I put up with the inconveniences and annoyances of life here.

But that got me thinking, how many of the museums in the city do I really visit?  I have my favorites, like the Frick, the Cloisters, and the Neue.  And there are the obvious blockbusters, like MoMA and the Guggenheim.  And gems like the Noguchi in Queens. The more I thought about it the more I guessed that there were “a lot” of museums in New York that I’ve never been to.  And, having left my job for a hopefully finite career sabbatical, I have some time on my hands these days. Wouldn’t it make a grand adventure to visit every single museum in the five boroughs, and keep a journal of where I’ve been and what I have thought of them. Who knows what amazing experiences would lie in store?

Sitting at the Met, I quickly scribbled some notes outlining the most immediately obvious things I’d need to embark on my Museum Project.  I’d need a list, from which to put together a project plan.  I had no idea how many museums I was in for, and how much time it would require.  I also needed some rules.  What constituted a visit?  What happened if I went and it was closed?  Would a “walk-by” count?  That sort of thing.

And thus was a plan born… there are a few background posts if you’re coming to this late.  Check the links in the right column. And then read on as I intrepidly set forth.

Museum Project: The Metropolitan Museum Buried in Snow