My art museum

I walked through the galleries of my local fine arts museum yesterday. I looked at Chinese pots dating back 8,ooo years and British watercolors only a century old. I gazed upon glossy silver and coins from the Byzantine Empire.

And I thought about how everything in the place was so stripped of context, trapped in those sterile glass boxes with only little placards to explain what it was.

In my art museum, it would be different. If I were going to display Medieval English stained glass from a church, you would walk into a darkened room with worn brick beneath your feet and the smell of incense in the air. The glass would be upon the wall with sunlight or at least faux sunlight shining through it. And you would sit upon a wooden pew with period church music softly playing, and thus experience it the way the artist intended.

If I were going to display Russian items, I would turn the thermostat in the room down until it was almost frigid. And you would walk a few steps through some artificial snow to get to the exhibit and you'd hear murmurs of authentic Russian conversation and maybe have to pay with a ruble to get inside.

If I were going to display ancient pots excavated from a Chinese burial chamber, I would recreate the very ambience of that chamber, as if my visitors were the archaeologists who discovered it.