Walk Softly and Carry a Big Schtick

Went yesterday for my annual physical and vaccinations. I’m pleased to report that I’m in better health than I was this time last year! I got my flu and COVID vaccinations, and after drowsing off and on all afternoon and evening yesterday, I'm feeling human again. Most of my labs are within normal limits, and the ones that aren't are much closer to normal that they had been. The only issue that needs any sort of intervention is I got a referral to podiatry for hammertoes. (Sing it with me: "Think it's time to Stop! Hammertoes!")

I hope you're all doing well, and if you have the means to follow up on your healthcare, I hope you're doing it.

A., L., and I are rewatching Brooklyn Nine-Nine. As we were sitting down to watch tonight, L. asked "Do you think there's Brooklyn Nine-Nine fanfic on AO3?" As A. and I assured her that there certainly was, I picked up my phone so I could tell her how many there were. As it turned out, there were 6,999 of them. So of course after we finished watching, I wrote a drabble to bring the totally up to an even 7,000. If you're interested, go check out "Dance the Night Away", in which one Sergeant Terrence Jeffords attends a TWICE concert!

“Exhibitions, like dreams, are temporary phenomena — but, also like dreams, they leave indelible traces in our experiences. Through a dialectical short circuit, exhibitions draw from the material culture of the past, are situated in the present, and anticipate futures.” (Adam Szymczyk, in “Passages: Koyo Kouoh, 1967-2025,” Artforum, Sept. 2025)

This was something I really enjoyed learning about in my museum studies classes. An exhibition tells a story. Sometimes it's a simple story, like people "People like Monet and our museum needs money." (Although hopefully even an exhibition like that can still tell a deep story.) Sometimes its a more complicated story, like "Here are some interesting and/or controversial things that contemporary artists are doing. You may find some of them shocking, but you should see them anyway.". And sometimes, an exhibition tells a story that can totally change the way people things about something, such that the exhibition lives on in peoples minds long after the wall tags have been taken down and the objects have been returned to storage.

For example, I would be very surprised to find someone who'd studied art history or museum studies in the US who had never heard of the 1992 Maryland Historical Society exhibition "Mining the Museum". This exhibition was mentioned in several of my classes, to the point that as soon as we heard "1992" and "Maryland" together, we'd start nodding, knowing what was coming next. In this exhibition, conceptual artist Fred Wilson combined items from the museum's collection that would typically be found in an art exhibition with items that are tied to the state's slave-owning past and would usually be hidden when discussing the art of the era. One photograph from the exhibition has become a shorthand for the whole thing. It's of a case labeled simply "Metalwork, 1793-1880," which contains a number of elaborate silver cups and pitchers as well as a pair of iron slave shackles.

The story that the exhibit designer is trying to tell is generally summarized in the large wall text at the beginning of the exhibition, which I've observed many people to skip over in their rush to get to the "good stuff" (i.e. the objects). If you're someone who skips over the wall text at the beginning of an exhibition, I'd like to urge you to do not do that — the experience of viewing the items will be even richer if you have this story in your mind as you view them. And if you're someone who already reads the wall text (thank you!), try keeping that story further to the front of your mind as you view the exhibition. You'll come to see that not only do the individual items have meaning, but the order in which you encounter them as you move through the exhibition and they ways in which they're juxtaposed spatially will also contribute to telling the story.