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More museums
Jun. 17th, 2011 12:00 pmI have a job! Well, a part-time minimum wage job. However! It's at the local Frank Lloyd Wright house, so it's relevant to my interests and also perhaps an entree to something more permanent. (Apparently people are more likely to hire you if you're currently employed. This is so unfair.)
I worked at a museum last summer and decided that I never wanted to do so again, but now I'm thinking I may have been too hasty: the problem may have been the particular museum, rather than museum work in general. We were one of five museums in a town of fifteen thousand, and redundant, and I felt sometimes this doesn't really matter; this is mere make-work.
And clearly it did matter to someone; you don't build a museum if it doesn't; but I couldn't make it matter enough to myself.
Frank Lloyd Wright houses, on the other hand, are art and therefore by nature matter. We're redoing the portfolios, looking through thousands of photos of the house from all angles and in all seasons until it seems to rise, breathing, and hover enchanted in the air. It's a low flat house, not at all like a castle, yet like a castle it seems to exude stories; it needs only denizens to live them.
When the current owner dies, the house will become a museum. This is the natural end of a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and it's only fair: these houses are art; the public deserves to see. But at the same time it grieves me. It is a house, and it's meant to be lived in.
Maybe I'm not cut out for museum-work, after all.
I worked at a museum last summer and decided that I never wanted to do so again, but now I'm thinking I may have been too hasty: the problem may have been the particular museum, rather than museum work in general. We were one of five museums in a town of fifteen thousand, and redundant, and I felt sometimes this doesn't really matter; this is mere make-work.
And clearly it did matter to someone; you don't build a museum if it doesn't; but I couldn't make it matter enough to myself.
Frank Lloyd Wright houses, on the other hand, are art and therefore by nature matter. We're redoing the portfolios, looking through thousands of photos of the house from all angles and in all seasons until it seems to rise, breathing, and hover enchanted in the air. It's a low flat house, not at all like a castle, yet like a castle it seems to exude stories; it needs only denizens to live them.
When the current owner dies, the house will become a museum. This is the natural end of a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and it's only fair: these houses are art; the public deserves to see. But at the same time it grieves me. It is a house, and it's meant to be lived in.
Maybe I'm not cut out for museum-work, after all.
