Megawatt McYapper

natural history museums are fascinating culturally because today, people basically go to them to see dinosaur bones. that's really it. or, you could say, virtually everyone going there wants to see the dinosaur bones. but the bulk of their collections are always a huge amount of taxidermied animals that many average people find bizarre, distasteful, or just odd. the animals are all all old, because you can't just go shoot a giraffe and bring it back to a museum today - which just makes it odder. they're often visibly like, a century old. you have massive halls of these things, and when you go, people are just kind of wandering around. there's the heavy hitters: an elephant, a lion - but even these have a shadow cast over them for the average museum goer, who - as people who have been to a modern zoo, find it odd to be looking at a dead gazelle, then a dead mountain goat, then a dead polar bear, and so on. not everyone thinks about this, of course. but the vibe is there. then you have the educated crowd, the kind of people who frequent museums, who either because of education or conditioning, however you want to say it, associate these displays with colonialism and a colonial mindset, or at least a mindset that's antithetical to modern environmental sensibilities. perhaps you've been online or in public recently and could deduce that rich white guys going out to shoot wildlife is not exactly celebrated at this time in major urban areas. and then, those are the type of people that actually run the museum - those educated (or conditioned) individuals. so, they can't even zoom out and make these displays about the men who collected this stuff, because they're not going to pump the story of a white guy in 1922 who went to africa and shot a bunch of elephants and threw them onto a ship and brought them back to america. the natural history museum in new york famously removed a statue of teddy roosevelt around five years ago that i used to eat lunch under outside - and he's like, a "good" guy compared to most of the men who really were just rolling around foreign countries in the early 1900s doing whatever they wanted. so, these places are generally packed - the museum itself: but it's all "sitting" on top of the dinosaur bones. that's really why people are there. the rest of the museum is, poetically, often just "bones", a skeleton - there because it's always been there, but just left abandoned and generally empty. i've completely skipped over things like african cultural halls, full of african stuff collected in the early 1900s, or native american halls, full of native american stuff that was collected in the early 1900s. these are also usually swept under the rug. the most recent african cultural hall i went to referred to at least one country that i am absolutely positive no longer exists. the natural history museum in new york is a great example of this. you walk in the front door: there's dinosaur bones. the whole top floor, which is all dinosaur bones, is always packed. but there are sections of the museum that are virtually always empty - massive sections of one of the largest cultural attractions in america's largest city, that are completely empty 99% of the time, because no one wants to walk around looking at weird dead birds (third floor, if i recall correctly). there are parts of that museum that i've never seen another human being in. they even have a "hall of asian peoples" section. would they build this now? absolutely not. it's literally just: "woah, look at how asian people do stuff. that's crazy". but they can't just tear it down - it's one of the biggest halls in the museum. so it's just... there. waiting. for no one. this hall is so unfrequented that i'm confident you could sleep on the floor here or set up a small picnic lunch of something and easily go unnoticed for 2 - 3 hours. noteworthy as it's like, 100 or 200 feet from the main hall where the main entrance is. i enjoy going to these places if they're in any city i go to. they're really world class - i'm not saying anything negative about them. everyone i've ever met that worked at any of them was always a super educated passionate person, and they have some of my favorite museum things (halls about geology, gems, are always very cool). but, unlike art, the idea and concept of "science" itself has changed at a breakneck pace since these places were built. they're like fractal science shrines, that contain in them the history of science itself. they're more about how our idea of science and the world has changed than about any particular item there. they're almost museums that are about the idea of a museum. and you can go back in time there, and visit an era when a guy could just roll up in africa, shoot a giraffe in the neck, shoot a baby giraffe right in the spine, and bring them back to america, and people would love it. they'd probably line up around the block to see these dead giraffes. there was a time when that was science, and that man wouldn't be a villain, he would be a hero. and although that's completely antithetical to modern sensibilities, the temples those men built are still standing.