Why? Or, Ashmolean Musings

Okay, so "Why?" is not the most original title Old Ken has ever come up with for a blog entry. Yet, as Hemingway taught us, sometimes blunt simplicity is necessary. And on occasions such as this, they are. Oh, are they ever! Were this not a blog, I would ask you, friend, to close your eyes and give yourself over to the imaginative play I am going to ask you to stage in upon the proscenium of your mind. Yet, unless you have a speaking feature on your computer that you have trained to read websites to you (or a butler or family pet to perform such functions), I appreciate that you will need to use your eyes to read the words entailing the situation I'd like you to imagine. Well, at least close one of your eyes to get the feel.

So, here we go: imagine you are in a museum cafe. You have just had a powerful cup of overpriced coffee and choked down a stale brownie. You look around you: the women in scarves are spread across the place as thickly as mayonnaise on a British sandwich. The agitation has begun to set in; perhaps it is nature that now calls you, or maybe the sight of so many scarves makes you newly conscious of the need to wash your hands before you run upstairs and fondle the museum's precious contents. (I like to think I run a pretty clean blog, so let's make like it's the latter case). Well, as you make your way out of the cafe (step carefully around the baby carriage—remember what happened last time?), you pass into the hallway. That's where you see it: a papier maché half-length "portrait" of the seventeenth-century founder of the museum. The question begins to well now in the depths of your diaphragm, resonating off your spleen until bursting forth from the epiglottis over and over again: "Why? Why? Why?"



Now, one can imagine or see such things. One may even be tempted to photograph them, noting that such monstrosities were assembled by some (presumably rabid) band of school children who masticated gobs of construction paper until it was ready to be cobbled together to form this "likeness" of Elias Ashmole (the poor man). Yet, something happens when (say) weeks later, one finds oneself in another museum in provincial Britain. While examining a fine collection of Baroque portraits (note the imperious Oliver Cromwell reflected in the mirror below) and genre paintings, one realizes that the museum staff has provided both the accoutrements worn in a Vermeer-esque interior and a mirror in which visitors observe themselves so decked out. Now, Old Ken regretfully reports that he was not able to really put on one of the lovely satin dresses shown flanking the mirror; however, I did think I cut quite a dashing figure in the feathered hat kindly provided for those of the early modern dandy persuasion (hello?).



I have a friend who managed to integrate discussion of such museum display techniques into one of his comprehensive examinations: silly academics! But, to Old Ken, it seems to underscore a sense of desperation among the curators—as if it requires some extravagant measures of "interactivity" to get people interested in the early modern period. I mean, can you imagine providing costumes so that museum-goers could dress up like Van Gogh (perhaps a bloody scarf to wrap around one's head) or providing a bunch of bathrobes so people could imitate the postures of those wretched paintings by Jim Dine (sweet, sweet Jim Dine)? Can you imagine having school children make a papier maché bust of (say) Peggy Guggenheim and then placing it in the entryway to the museum in Bilbao? Absurd as these travesties would be, such is the reality to which we partisans of the early modern period see great works of art subjected in the paste-covered hands of those who would tart them up like so many Saturday-night strumpets!

Oh well, time to go change my colostomy bag and soak my dentures.