If you feel like we’ve been bashed with
a load of lumber, it’s not your imagination. It’s true.
It happened on Sunday, when the mighty Chicago Tribune published a
feature-length review describing our new Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Museum as a “flop.”
The writer, Blair Kamin, is a Pulitzer Prize
winner who prides himself on being an “activist
critic.” In the introduction to his 2001 book Why Architecture Matters (a collection of his essays previously published in the Trib), Kamin takes on
the responsibility of protecting the good citizens of Chicago from
bad buildings, writing that, as an activist critic, “You
whack at the offending party with the journalistic equivalent of a
two-by-four.”
He landed several stinging swats on
Springfield’s new jewel, calling it a “mawkish indoor
theme park” with “astonishingly banal”
architecture and a “disappointingly unadventurous”
interior design. He smacked the exhibits, too, deriding some as
“old-fashioned dioramas” and scolding the designers,
BRC Imagination Arts, for making the theater presentations so
flashy that they might upstage the authentic artifacts.
Worse yet, Kamin called the museum “very
Disneyfied.” To most of us mere mortals, that might sound
like a compliment. Coming from Kamin, though, it’s anything
but. “That something should be ‘Disneyfied’ is
the most horrible fate of all,” according to a scholarly
cultural-criticism journal called The
New Criterion in its review of
Kamin’s book.
I should admit: As a journalist, I’ve
never been a fan of the art of criticism. It’s probably the
one newspaper job I’ve never wanted. I’ve seen it
seduce even really smart people into becoming so full of themselves
that they end up saying something stupid — in print,
preserved for all posterity. I’m not even certain that an
architecture critic has the right to condemn museum exhibits just
because they’re located inside a new and important building.
If the building housed an art gallery, could the architecture
critic analyze the paintings? If it housed a restaurant, could he
parse the spices in the artichokes barigoule? If it housed a
concert hall, could he dissect the conductor’s interpretation
of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles? I’m just asking. I don’t know.
I asked museum executive director Richard Norton Smith whether there exists a species of
critic whose job is to review museum exhibits. He said, sure,
it’s everybody.
“We’ve had close to 9,000 people
come through already, and probably 3,000 of those were
schoolkids,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many
schoolteachers have come up to me and said, ‘Where have you
been all of my life?’ ”
I know that the sixth-grader in my house
— a child so permanently tethered to his Nintendo appliance
that it might as well be a pacemaker — came home from his
tour saying that the museum totally rocks.
As for me, the last kid on my block to see the
museum, I kept all of Kamin’s comments fresh in my mind as I
took my tour Tuesday afternoon. I got to see a few things that
weren’t there when Kamin came, such as Lincoln’s
deathbed, so common and small that the president had to lie
diagonally across it as he waited to die.
I strolled through the other exhibits,
pretending to be a critic, actively looking for problems to
nitpick. I dredged up two: There were a couple of spots where I
could hear too many audio tracks simultaneously, a phenomenon I
find somewhat irritating. And there were moments when I found
myself so deep into a “journey” that I wondered whether
I could have found my way out if I had needed to escape with, for example, my unruly toddler.
But even without trying, I found many moments
that engulfed, enlightened, and enchanted me. I found myself not
only learning but also wanting to learn more.
I kept waiting to feel the kind of disdain
that Kamin expressed, and that feeling never came. Maybe I’m
just not smart enough to be offended by rubber mannequins if
they’re teaching me something I didn’t already know.
Kamin criticized the exhibits as “better
at provoking emotion than provoking thought.” And it’s
true — the exhibits tug at the heartstrings. But
there’s also an abundance of factual background presented
with every item in the museum, if you choose to take the time to
absorb it.
Leaving the museum, I couldn’t help but
think of a little ditty Mary Poppins sang while dosing her charges
with cough syrup. Ostensibly about swallowing a nasty elixir, the
song is really a metaphor for all sorts of healthful pursuits. You
know it; it’s about how a spoonful of sugar helps the
medicine go down.
Kamin, though, must’ve missed it. After
all, it is in a Disney movie.
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2005.
