The Politics of Art & Authenticity

I’m not really sure why I didn’t write about this immediately after I went but better late than never? Sometime in early October, I went the American Museum of Natural History. I must disclose however, I cheated a little bit. My anthropology class required us to visit the Human Origins exhibit as a part of a larger, semester long project. The assignment consisted of visiting the exhibit and creating a test that conveyed to our professor that we visited and learned something. My initial reaction was to groan and complain because well… I’m good at that. The somewhat, almost cultured member of society inside me was a little excited as soon as I walked inside of the museum. There’s something mystical about the immense amount of information that lurks around every corner of the place. Even though I was assigned to go to one exhibit, and I didn’t have too much time, some part of me wanted to explore and get lost in as many other exhibits as possible. Another disclaimer: I am a history junkie so I actually didn’t mind the exhibit of Human Origins in the least. In the midst of searching for little bits of information that, in my opinion, would make good test questions, I found myself engaged and enveloped in the things I was reading. It was incredible to learn that archaeologists could determine the time period that our ancestors lived in simply by studying the kinds of plants and bacteria that existed then. There was a whole wall dedicated to displaying the percentages of genetic similarity that we share with various apes. There were dozens of life-size replicas of what our ancestors looked like as they evolved throughout human history. Not only was I getting an assignment done, but I was also learning about something that I find fascinating. Even after I was done making up impossible test questions, I found myself reading, observing, and analyzing all the different exhibits. It’s safe to say that I enjoyed my visit to the American Museum of Natural History. Hopefully over Christmas Break when I’m no longer drowning in schoolwork, I’ll be able to go back on my own time and explore some more exhibits.