I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers (Can museums save the world?)

I just posted a new essay, I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers, subtitled “Can museums save the world'?

It’s an un-edited, pre-publication draft of a piece for for Seize the Moment: Rethinking the Museum (Marsha Semmel, Ken Yellis, Avi Decter, ed.) to be published in early 2022 by Rowman and Littlefield. It is also an expansion of a short piece I wrote with the same title for Ten Perspectives on the Future of Digital Culture, a 2018 publication commemorating the 10th anniversary of Europeana.

The basic idea of the essay is to use a very modest, first-person time-travel narrative as a way to speak bluntly about what I see as the cultural sector’s reticence to get much involved in climate action and social justice.

In one passage I find myself standing at my office window looking out at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution in the days, months, and years following 9-11 (a very real memory for me and one that has shaped much of my work over the last 20 years).

How would these three, august institutions help us understand what had happened to us as a nation? What would they do to help us chart our way forward in this complex and dangerous world?

As I stared into my beer, I couldn’t think of a single thing that any of these institutions, or even museums in general, had done to help Americans think clearer thoughts or make better decisions after 9/11. It wasn’t a museum’s job, or so we thought. Just hunker down, entertain the guests, conserve the collections and don’t rock the boat. So we lost our minds and went to war for 20 years without even an exhibition catalog as a souvenir.

More at I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers (Can museums save the world?).

* * * On a related note, in November, 2021 I’m organizing a workshop and strategy charrette to try and do something to jumpstart real action from the cultural sector. We need help funding travel for participants. Please give us a hand!

GoFundMe: Help Send Climate Activists To The Hague
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-send-climate-activists-to-the-hague

Image credits: Remix of ‘The Boyfriend’ by Alžbeta Halušková. CC BY-SA. Source material: Za frajerom | Hanula, Jozef. Slovak National Gallery. Public domain. Creator: Alžbeta Halušková. Date: 2018. Country: Slovakia. CC BY-SA