Museums ain't what they used to be

Museum, a word from the Greek mouseion, meaning home of the Muses, covers the waterfront these days: from the Sex Museum in New York and the Lunchbox Museum in Columbus, GA., to the Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum in Plano, TX and the, Mustard Museum in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin.

In Greek mythology the Muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. It follows that a museum is a kind of memory bank, where time stops and allows experiences beyond the day.

But in art museums today, you get displays seen elsewhere. Consider the shows that have taken place in New York museums, like Jackie Onassis dresses at the Museum of Modern Art. Or the motorcycle show at the Guggenheim Museum. Or Coco Chanel fashions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or the Met’s show of baseball cards, where packs of cardboard that once stiffened packages of bubble gum stand with the likes of Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rembrandt. How do ball players’ pictures and their stats fit in with such art history?

Granted, contemporary culture takes in art forms other than the traditional painting and sculpture – video and performance art, for example. But a retrospective of bikes, baseball cards and ball gowns? Come on!

There are plenty of other venues for diversions like these and plenty of precedent for them, too. The “Dime Museum” run by Phineas T. Barnum in the 19th century was an example of the popular approach, where you could see jugglers, rope dancers and the 25-inch tall Charles S. Stratton, who Barnum re-named Tom Thumb.

And the hits keep coming.

Movies have come to area museums. While the ongoing film series at the Dali Museum serves the painter, and showing the work of video artist Janet Biggs next year at the Tampa Museum serves the mission of an art museum, the Ringling Museum of Art gives you the stuff of Turner Movie Classic, like “Some Like It Hot,” “Spartacus” and “Psycho.”

Barnum lives.