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Rapacious or Audacious: How will future museums curate 2020 America?
If you enjoy museums, you’re probably a sucker for a boffo exhibition. What’s special about them, apart from the individual artifacts, is the thematic spine around which the exhibitions are built. There is always a curatorial intelligence at work behind the scenes, even if the display cards can sometimes seem laughably opaque.
Of course, museum exhibitors have an advantage. They see more clearly all the bad choices, bad luck, and bad people that shaped an age, as well as all the good and worthy features that perhaps redeemed it. In short, they can step back, mix and match, weave and speculate, compare and contrast, arrange and highlight in ways that make us see the human experience in all its maddening beauty and confounding contradictions.
Imagine then the challenge for future museum curators when faced with explaining the perilous historical period in which we now find ourselves. What artifacts will they choose? And what will they say and write about us? At the risk of anticipating posterity’s experts, here are a few admittedly hypothetical and altogether fanciful displays they might consider. The question for 2020 Americans is if this is how we want to be remembered. And if not, what would we change? There’s still time.
Plastic water bottle & PDK (Disassembled plastic)
