An Extended Riff on Museums

I particularly like Hamburg's history museum, since I come from a region that more or less ignores its own history -- only a few rooms of post-Indian Los Angeles history at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, or even worse, the abomination that is Bowers Museum in Orange County. Bowers dumped its focus on the history of Orange County to become a "museum of cultural art". There are hundreds of better museums to see art in -- many of them in Southern California! -- than Bowers can ever aspire to be, but there's pratically nowhere else that could have provided a better forum for local history, and they've almost completely turned their back on that. (And what the heck is cultural art, anyway? What do they consider to be non-cultural art? Comic books?)

Also, Arts & Crafts: someday I'd like to open a Museum of Arts & Crafts that contains what people first think of when they hear the phrase "arts and crafts". We'd have displays like "Popsicle-Stick Art: A Critical Re-evaluation", "100 Years of Macrame", and "Leatherwork, Lanyards, and Basketweaving: Selections From Our Summer Camp Permanent Collection". I think that the only museum I've seen that even comes close to this is the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.

(I believe it was the connection between "arts and crafts" and "popsicle sticks" in many people's minds that caused the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland to change their name to the California College of the Arts: people weren't taking them seriously enough. And yes, I know about the Arts & Crafts Movement, William Morris, and the like; I may be irreverent at the moment, but I'm not a total cretin.)