museums – From Under the Fig Tree

Show & tell

joselitNovember 4, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Like people, museums come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some, like the Nut Museum in Connecticut, are small and quirky; others, like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are mighty and marvelous.

Whatever their ambitions or contents, museums loom large these days, beckoning us with all manner of innovative, interactive exhibitions, imaginative public programming, seductive gift shops and enticing restaurants.

At a time when many of us are more apt to keep company with our digital appurtenances than with one another, the contemporary museum is the latter-day equivalent of the public square or commons. It brings us together -- and out of the house.

Enlarging our vision of the world, museums have also increasingly become the site of communal affirmation, a place where we seek out our identity. No longer just a treat for the eyes, this premier cultural institution, a child of the Enlightenment, is now called on to nourish and sustain our souls.

Behind this recent development lies a great big yarn, one that encompasses politics and money, religion and ethnicity, postmodernism and the digital age.

It’s a story that calls out for a master storyteller -- someone on the order of Edward Rothstein, the critic-at-large of The New York Times. His weekly column on the latest exhibition -- from Prohibition to spiders and from Holocaust museums in Israel to the dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History -- are marvels of economy, insight and wit.

But don’t take my word for it. Mr. Rothstein will be speaking at GW next Tuesday, November 13th, at 7 p.m., in the Jack Morton Auditorium. His lecture is free and open to the public. Come hear for yourselves as he weighs in on “Identity Museums and Their Discontents." A stimulating, thought-provoking evening awaits.

Close Encounters 1

joselitNovember 6, 2011November 16, 20171 Comment

These days, when digital devices rule the roost, it’s often hard to make the case for the old-fashioned rituals of social interaction.

What seems to be going the way of the dinosaur is the kind of camaraderie and good fellowship that can only take place face-to-face, within the context of the public square and its institutions such as theatres and museums, where conversations are born of serendipity.

crowd — Flickr/Saskatchewan Jazz Festival

Yes, I know that texting is a marvelous way to keep in touch, but there’s something about watching a performance or looking at objects within the company of others that does a better job of bringing us together.

Last night’s performance of The Merchant of Venice at GW’s Bett’s Auditorium was a case in point. Though much to my dismay, several students seated right in front of me spent much of the show texting away, most of the audience – especially those who stayed for the post-performance talk-back – forged a relationship with the play and its actors that was alive, rather than mediated. For several hours on a Saturday night in November, a disparate group of people found common cause in a 400 year old play.

Much the same can be said of visiting a museum and of looking at the real thing rather than at simulacra or avatars. There’s an immediacy to the experience, a sense of belonging to something larger than one’s self, that is well worth celebrating, much less preserving.

But don’t take my word for it. This Tuesday evening, November 8th, at 7 p.m., at GW’s Jack Morton Auditorium (School of Media & Public Affairs), NYU University Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will be speaking on “The Elusive Object: The Meaning of Things in a Digital Age.” Be there.

By George

joselitJune 19, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Multiple ties bind this blog and the university that hosts it to George Washington. We proudly take our name and many of our cues from him.

George Washington, Public Garden, Boston, Mass. Flickr/Eric Hatch

Under the circumstances, then, fans of the first president of the United States would do well to consult the June 24 issue of The Forward, which features both an editorial and a front-page article about the fate of the famous 1790 letter assuring the Jews of Newport of religious liberty.

As it turns out, this foundational document, a staple of American Jewry’s political and civic identity, currently reposes in a Maryland storage facility, where it’s kept under wraps. “What a loss!” The Forward declares, coming down hard in favor of publicly displaying the text.

At a time when simulacra have taken the place of the real thing, and historical literacy is increasingly an artifact of the past, taking the measure of an 18th century text with our own eyes is an experience to be cherished.

Getting hitched

joselitJune 5, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Now that June is upon us, it’s high season for weddings — and reason enough for the Jewish Museum in New York to mount an exhibition of ketubot, Jewish marriage contracts.

The Art of Matrimony showcases 30 different versions of the age-old document. Some hail from the Cairo genizah of the 12th century, others from the atelier of a contemporary artist. Some bear flowers, others fish and still others a sturdy handshake. For all their differences, each ketubbah reflects a union of heart and head.

cupid — A "cheeky" Cupid. Flickr/Cinnamon Cooper

Elsewhere within the museum world, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia has gone a step further in its commitment to the ketubbah by operating a Ketubah Gallery where happy couples can have this “monumental milestone marker,” as one museum official would have it, made to order.

And if that weren’t enough to highlight the central role that the Jewish marriage contract plays, both contemporaneously as well as historically, the most current issue of Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture features a fascinating article by Jeffrey Shandler on the multiple and varied meanings the ketubbah has accrued over time and space: at once a legal document and a work of art, a token of steadfastness and an emblem of idiosyncrasy.

In his Transformations of the Ketubbah; Or, The Gallery of Broken Marriages, Shandler does more than chronicle the ways in which the Jewish marriage contract has changed its stripes over the years. His account offers a smart and close reading of the mutually constitutive relationship between the ketubbah and its context, be it domestic or museological, a matter of ritual or of aesthetics.

Given his subject matter, one expects Shandler’s essay to end with a paean to the power of love or with a salute to the stability of Jewish identity. Instead, it concludes on a playfully ironic and decidedly post-modern note: Jewish museums are blessed with an abundance of Jewish marriage contracts because of the frequency of divorce. The “Jewish public,” Shandler tells us, “have repurposed the museum itself by using it as a repository for their unwanted ketubbot.”

In contemporary America, Cupid’s arrows, it seems, have found a new target.

Object lesson

joselitMarch 7, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

In my household, Sundays are usually given over to two rituals: reading The New York Times and taking in a museum exhibition. I suspect your household is no different.

But, as I explained recently to a group of GW alumni who had come together on a rainy Sunday morning to visit the brand new National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia as part of an alumni series called “GW Culture Buffs,” the mere thought of doing exactly what we were doing had once generated more than its fair share of controversy.

We take our Sundays-at-the-museum for granted; earlier generations of culture buffs did not. Many museum officials and their elite patrons were initially rather resistant to the idea of opening the doors of, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on a Sunday, fearful lest it attract the wrong kind of people—those with “vandal hands” or broken English. A Sunday at the Met, they warned, was a “perilous experiment.”

Metropolitan Museum button — Once upon a time, Met entry buttons were useless on a Sunday. Credit: Charley Lhasa/Flickr

Americans, especially Jewish immigrants from the Lower East Side, didn’t see things quite that way and joined hands with socially conscious civic reformers to expand the franchise of museum-going by writing editorials in the Yiddish press and circulating petitions on the Jewish street.

Where America’s elite believed that visiting a museum was a privilege, Americans at the grass roots believed that it was a right, a perquisite of urban citizenship.

Were it not for the zealousness and passion with which they defended that belief, the nation’s museums would be grand, if empty, spaces.