Last week was my first time visiting the Museum of Modern Art, and I came with a lot of expectations. Walking through the halls and seeing just a taste of what the museum had in its walls escalated my excitement to see our main attraction. And while the Punk Rock exhibit did give me a lot of information into a genre that I admittedly didn’t know much about, the curators made a poor mistake when designing the display.
The collage was a chaotic mixture of photographs, articles, and flyers of the musicians that brought the genre of punk rock from clubs of New York to the world stage. Unfortunately, this was all the chaos we were going to get out of the display. The rest of the exhibit was organized meticulously, from the perfect alignment of the album’s samples to the square shape of the music video stations. I felt like I couldn’t get into the music while encased within the pristine-ness. “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell and “Heart of Glass” by Blondie felt like they needed to be surrounded by color. I felt weird watching Dominatrix’s “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight” in the bright lighting of the exhibit.
I felt that the designers could have put a little more effort into creating a vibe within the display that corresponded with the genre. It didn’t have to be anything drastic; dimmed lighting, obscured framing of the cases, colored light bulbs, or uneven placing of the music video stations would have achieved this without breaking their budget. I enjoyed everything that I saw and heard at the punk rock exhibit, but I wished that the curator’s didn’t try to conform the genre to be cohesive with the rest of the museum. It was misleading and the genre lost its authenticity.
