Primarily for my library & literary geek friends

[drwex]

NPR did a fascinating piece on art conservation as public display. Seems the newly reopened Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery have a new area with floor-to-ceiling glass walls behind which visitors can watch conservators doing their daily work. Apparently they get to wear custom aprons designed by Isaac Mizrahi.

Back when I used to inhabit the Media Lab we did much of our work behind similar glass walls, referred to as "fishbowls" and frequently plastered with signs like "Please don't feed the graduate students." The signs mostly amused visitors but really annoyed the Lab PR staff who had to give tours of the (in)famous place. Clever research groups plastered their glass with pretty pictures and work samples to amuse and distract passers-by. I mean, how exciting can it be to watch a bunch of scruffy grad students banging away at keyboards?

The Smithsonian experiment also reminds me of long ago when tamidon and I used to go out often to dinner and glass-walled kitches were all the rage. She used to sniff at the notion of cooking as performance art, though the wild popularity of the Food Channel and this weekend's animated conversations over the utter fascinatingness of Alton Brown might lead one to think differently. I have to wonder, though, if there's really so much "fascinating" stuff in conservation as the Smithsonian is making it out to be.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, it appears that the Dewey Decimal system of library cataloging is still alive. I thought Library of Congress designations had wiped out Dewey, but apparently not. Harper's Magazine published this list of new Library of Congress subject headings that received Dewey Decimal numbers last year. The list includes such topical gems as "Exaggeration (philosophy)", "Middle-aged sexual minorities", and "Video wrestling games".

coslinks pointed me to a YouTube page with a "music video" called Tyger, inspired by the William Blake poem The Tyger. The video is a cool mix of animation, live action and puppetry. I used to have a link to a good analysis of this poem but I lost it many years ago and simple Google searching isn't helping me. If someone knows of a good page that annotates or comments well on this poem I'd love to read it.

Comments

[rmd.livejournal.com]

i think much of it isn't that the activity is 'fascinating', but that the observer can see themselves as part of the process -- "oh, i saw them working on that..."

not to mention the allure of "insider"-ness, where you see things that are *perceived* as not being available to everyone. (the basis for much of the discover/history channels' programming at times)

[drwex]

I thnk that's a good point. "Fascinating" is really just an advertising word, which doesn't adequately describe the reasoning and experience of the tourist/visitor.