With Sakina Abdus Shakur sidelined for the day with a virus, my trip to the Penn Museum found itself postponed until a day next week. It is to be the first of many and varied museums visited over the course of this project, not counting a probable excursion to the Philadelphia Art Museum tomorrow night to catch the “Cezanne and Beyond” exhibition. I spent the day arranging various other meetings and have a fairly stocked schedule even after the end of Track season this weekend. Plenty of reading to do with the articles I found today on ProQuest about the Jewish National Fund and land discrimination in Israel, plus magazines (Atlantic, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Good, The New Republic, Wired and Current History) and books (Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline, Collapse, et al.).
“Museums are morphing. Once they were chroniclers or collectors… Now many have become crucibles: places where a cultural identity is hammered out, refined and shaped.” – Edward Rothstein, The New York Times
“Museums are lightning rods for some of today’s most hotly contested issues, including debates over how to present history and questions of the ownership of culture.” – from Johns Hopkins University museum pamphlet
“If you add up the attendance for every major-league baseball, basketball, football and hockey game this year, the combined total will come to about 140 million people…barely a fraction of the 850 million people annually” to visit museums, according to Bob Mondello of National Public Radio
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