Curator, there's a butterfly in my fruit

This week I managed to put down my bucket and spade long enough to see what the many and various museums of Brighton and Hove had to offer. The Royal Pavilion was showing a particularly interesting installation/intervention of three thousand black ceramic butterflies by Clare Twomey called 'A Dark Day in Paradise'. It teetered quite efficiently between decorative and distressing, the play between theme and variation was satisfying. I'm not sure of the stability of their significance, I was reminded occasionally of the treasure hunts galleries and museums stage for children in that, paradoxically, concentration can become distracting. Also surprising that they weren't also for sale in the gift shop!

New Design Template...a new Blog-o-sphere

The Blog has been a bit quiet lately, with only the valiant efforts of Rebecca to keep the lamp burning...(Thanks Rebecca!)....I've been a little bit preoccupied, writing some stuff I'm supposed to be delivering soon...(more anon.).
But anyway, I thought, in order to breath some more life into the embers I'd redesign the webpage...(well, it's more of a pret-a-webpage, rather than me actually fiddling about with photo-shop...and that comment demonstrates that I'm really not up-to-date with these techy things.....)...so what do you think?...or should we go back to the old design?

Anyway...thanks Rebecca for a really provocative post...and you're right, these 'traditional' museum displays are quite romantic...(in a positive sense, I mean....as in the poetics of history....)..and are part of the heritage of museum displays..maybe there should be a new body to protect museums from being re-displayed?....maybe we should develop a Grading for Museums...as they do for Architecture etc...?

More blogging to come...
Mark

In Praise of Independent Museums

I think this might be the best one room, one pound museum I've come across on my recent travels. I thought these dioramas from Marazion Museum were really worth sharing. It's easy to be disparaging, but museums that lie outside centralised funding structures and formal accreditation can perhaps pursue more interesting, or eccentric, or alarming, modes of classification and conservation. At their best, independent museums seem to disrupt the ways in which the museum professional is figured, even revealing their efforts as just a little turgid. Or perhaps I'm being unintentionally condescending in implying an enthusiastic amateurishness at work, in a similar way to the contemporary perception of 'outsider art'?