Voice of America News July 13, 2011
Israel Approves Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance Project Despite Muslim Objections
Muslims groups have objected to the Museum of Tolerance being built on an ancient burial site. Is it the covering of the site, or the museum that’s the problem? Apparently part of the site was built over by a car park without objections. So it must be the museum. Museums always have a tricky task of presenting the past in places of conflict, they can help the situation but can also make things worse. In this case it doesn’t appear to be bringing both sides together. Can cloudy thinking help?
Is it the name? Is ‘Tolerance’ part of the problem? I bet the Muslim community has a different name for it. Companies change their names when there is a commercial imperative, so why not a museum? Instantly wipe away the baggage of years of unwanted history and start again? Cloudy thinking recommends a wholesale radical museum renaming programme.
But, firstly lets fix the Arab/Israeli conflict. If a car park is something both sides can accept. Ergo ‘The Car Park Museum’ solves the problem. It will also be a world first, something both sides can share equally (as long as spaces aren’t reserved) and be a celebration of togetherness. It may not end years of conflict, but in future academics may see this as the turning point, and really clever academics will invent ‘The Car Park Theory of Social Integration’ and make a fortune – but you heard it here first.
Cloudy thinking suggests taking it one step further and make it a museum of car park spaces. Visitors will get to drive their car over a museum artifact. What museum visitor doesn’t secretly want to do this? Or any museum curator for that matter. OK, so there may be a few access versus conservation issues but what museum doesn’t have those?
In gentle old Blighty can the same strategy be applied? The V&A took tentative steps towards this a few years ago with their advert ‘An Ace Caff With Quite A Nice Museum Attached’. Should they have gone further and actually changed the name of the museum to that as well? In these times of commercial imperitves its an even better name now.
Visit the UK’s premier national museum, the British Museum. Go inside and you’ll struggle to find anything British. It is a world museum so why not call it that? However, this may lead to more requests from countries to have their stuff back appropriated in the days of Empire. If this conflict can’t be avoided address it head on – rename it ‘The Museum of Stuff That is Ours Now’. The Museum of Unreason realizes this is not a snappy title but seems to confront a pressing issue for all museums with world collections. Surely it will stop countries unreasonably asking for their stuff back, but it may actually increase conflict.
Cloudy thinking recommends the reduction of conflict rather than the opposite. So can this diaspora of collections around the world be condensed into an abstract noun? How about the ‘Museums of Tolerance’? That might work, but if not, they can always start building car parks.
If you take any of the views expressed in this blog seriously then you should really think about changing your name as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment