Gemini Proxy
Museums and modernism
I watched 'Night at the Museum' with my family recently: a good adventure movie, not bad for my eldest, aged ten, but not able to hold the attention of my youngest, who is six.
It made me think of the museum of my past, the Melbourne Museum when it was still located with the State Library of Victoria. This is a beautiful, neoclassical building, first opened in the 1850s, with a domed reading room reminiscent of the British Museum Reading Room added in 1913. I loved to visit as a child, and as a teenager I made trips to the city to research assignments in the library.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/State_Library_of_Victoria_Dome.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/British_Museum_Reading_Room%2C_reading_desk_F1.jpg
But at some point the museum, which had been a matter of gallery halls filled with stuffed animals, rocks, and occasional exhibitions full of things like Egyptian sarcophagi, got replaced with an institutional modernist building that felt more about everyday life, working-class culture rather than high, plaques and narrative and multimedia rather than objects. And it developed a focus on Indigenous culture, which never grabbed me. The new place simply isn't somewhere I feel compelled to visit.
I realized that this might not be
entirely about the way that the
I'm very against modernism. I have
seldom personally enjoyed it (a
the true cause of the blessedness of the good angels is found to be
this, that they cleave to Him who supremely is. And if we ask the
cause of the misery of the bad, it occurs to us, and not
unreasonably, that they are miserable because they have forsaken Him
who supremely is, and have turned to themselves who have no such
essence. And this vice, what else is it called than pride?
(Augustine, 'City of God', book 12, ch. 6)
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45304/45304-h/45304-h.htm
Modernism leaves the good we inherit from the past, and instead embraces the will to be self-made:
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quickening power...
(Satan in Milton, 'Paradise Lost', book V)
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26/pg26-images.html
It's an image of much in our culture: a perhaps unwitting embrace of disorder, ugliness, and ultimately even death, that can begin with ideas like 'I can do better than God', or 'there is no natural law (and no natural rights, but only the law made and the rights bestowed by the state)'.
I think we ought to reject modernism. We should seek the good, not the new.
https://midnight.pub/posts/2829
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