Nathan Yarnell Museum Intro

Hello everyone. My name name is Nathan Yarnell and I'm majoring in Art, currently a senior with only one semester left in spring. I'm hoping to use my minor in psychology and education to help students in schools. I'm taking this course because I think museums are interesting and I've always wondered what kind of ethical decisions people make when cleaning or repairing an artifact. For example, examining what colors of figures might have been featured in a piece. I really enjoy ancient history museums and art museums. My favorite museum is The Denver Museum,The though I've only been twice. The little fella in the photo is my dog Pepper, having a snooze on the floor.
 My current relationship to museums is that I really enjoy visiting them, perhaps my own art will be featured there in the future. I was aware before reading Museums Are Not Neutral: We Are Stronger Together that many museums stole from other cultures though that's mostly due to my knowledge of history. For example The Benin "Bronzes" were stolen from Benin after they were looted. Many artifacts were extremely mishandled and aren't even available to see in Benin. Though this is probably just the tip of the iceberg in how museums attain artifacts and I'm
hoping to explore further into museum discourse. There's also the whole Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal, wherein they smuggled many, thankfully fake artifacts from Iran.

Comments

  1. littlebluebox83August 30, 2020 at 3:13 PM

    Hello Nathan!

    I have been to the Denver Art Museum once, last year for their exhibit of Dior clothes. I only went for that particular exhibit, and I would love to go back and explore the rest of the museum! What is your favorite bit of the museum?

    Museums owning collections from other cultures that did not give permission is a huge issue right now. A really famous example are the Elgin marbles that are in the British Museum. The marbles are classical Greek sculpture that were cut off the Parthenon (about half of the surviving sculptures were removed from the ruins) and shipped to London. The British Museum has flatly refused to return the pieces to Greece just as they have with the Benin bronzes.

    There's been an illegal antiquities market for a long time, but what makes Hobby Lobby's involvement particularly egregious is that they purport to be an upstanding religiously own and operated business, AND many of the items they were smuggling in were supposed to go to their "Museum of the Bible" in Washington D.C., which already has millions in artifacts they bought overseas. It really puts the whole business and their museum collection in a different light. I think Hobby Lobby's behavior has some of the the same colonialist tone and attitude that the British Museum has. They feel that they have a right to these pieces regardless of origin, ownership, international law, or custom.

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  2. AshtonAugust 30, 2020 at 5:56 PM

    The Denver Museum of Nature and Science or the Denver Art Museum? I'd say the Nature and Science museum would be more up your alley for a history buff like yourself with the Egyptian exhibit. I mentioned this on another student's blog but some people just go by their own aesthetics and have even stripped pieces completely of their colour!

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