Museum as Utopian Future

Some days, too many, I don’t feel that I get enough significant stuff done. I have been here all day working on writing. I’ve got 2 interviews to go thru and glean something from. However, before I can make sense of what I want to say, I need to write a preliminary article that frames the interviews and subsequent articles in a series that I’m working on.

I’ve asked three, and will ask other, museum directors to look to the future and tell me what the future looks like for Southeast Florida art and culture. That’s from W. Palm Beach to Miami. There are a number of museums but I’m also interested in the universities. There are two prongs to my thinking. One is that they are holders of collections (only some of the universities have collections as such) and all that that means to be a repository. The second is along the lines of the educational mandates that go along with having non-profit status, although corporations are snuggling up to the museums for the high profile cultural value it lends them (with some high dollar “donations” for programming). And even though museums are not-for-profit, they usually do have gift shops, books stores, and such which brings in commodification of that culture.

So, as can be seen, I’ve bitten into a big project but, it will have something self-serving in the end. It will first of all, allow me to get to know the museum directors better and, it will give me something more important to write about than what exhibition I might have seen over the weekend. Normally, I only write on what really interests me and that is something I can bring some personal experience to. Whatever those things are usually have a socio-cultural framework from which I can contextualize in a way that is not the hegemonic view, and postcolonial is highly preferred to postmodernism.

The beginning of postmodernism I was on hiatus, out racing bicycles and traveling. I was, however, still reading critical theory, anthropology, ethnology, non-western religious systems (African in particular), ethnobotany, and plenty of books on nutrition, athlete training, massage, and race tactics based on physiology and musculature.

Anyway, it’s way past my bedtime again. I’m more in tune with the night than getting up early in the morning… I work in the afternoon tomorrow. 🙂