In which a minor rant at curators is delivered

I know, this isn't the Ranting Wanderer, this is the Raving Wanderer. Pick nits with the linguists while I rant.

I had the opportunity to visit the Museo de Arte Precolumbino today. This is apparently a branch of a larger collection in Lima (check the web page for details). It has an exquisite collection of pre-Columbian art, that is exquisitely presented. Of all the museums I visited today (five but who's counting besides my wallet), this was the most modern, and the most expensive (20 soles, about US$7).

Each case in the collection had one or more pieces, with words printed beneath in Spanish, English, and French. Based on what I know of these languages, the translations appeared to track.

I will now quote the first portion of a "description" of one of the pieces in the collection:

Even in spite of the separation from their natural surroundings and setting, one nevertheless finds these sculptures highly suggestive and beautiful.

WTF? (Pardon my French.)

After reading dribble like this, I could only conclude that the writer was someone desparately in need of a punctured ego to deflate his overweening sense of self-importance and condescension. I mean, the one sentence I copied above is obvious even to the nearest 12-year-old who is in a museum for the first time. Who does he think he's impressing? I could put that sentence as part of a description next to a Coke bottle and would probably work as well, since it says nothing about the piece itself.

The sample above is just that -- a sample. Many of the object "descriptions" were this sort of self-important art-history bologna, often using five dollar words for relatively simple concepts. Or for projecting aesthetics onto an artist who's been dead for 1000 years.

And then there's the stuff they didn't tell. For example, where each piece was found. Pieces were grouped into rooms by culture (Peru oozes with at least half a dozen different precolumbian cultures), and only identified by culture. Thanks. Now if I want to see, say, relevant publically-reachable archaeological sites, I have no clue where to go.

Is the horse dead now?


Pictures:


This is the courtyard of a different museum, which occupied a colonial-era house.


This is from a house museum in Sevilla (in Spain, taken on last year's trip), for comparison.


Doorway in the Cusco museum.


Detail of the door.