FUN FOR EVERYONE: THE EMERGENCE OF POPULAR CULTURE MUSEUMS
Jo-el M. Smith
A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
Department of History
University of North Carolina Wilmington
2012
Approved by
Advisory Committee
Candice Bredbenner Glen Harris
Tammy S. Gordon Chair
Accepted by
Dean, Graduate School
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT...... iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... iv
DEDICATION...... vi
LIST OF FIGURES ...... vii
CHAPTER 1 – IN THE BEGINNING: THE EXISTING LITERATURE ...... 1
CHAPTER 2 – LOOK AT ME RELIQUARY MUSEUMS: THE BEGINNING OF POPULAR
CULTURE MUSEUMS ...... 21
CHAPTER 3 – VARIETY: POPULAR CULTURE MUSEUMS FROM HERE TO THERE ....49
CHAPTER 4 – ‘EXPERIENCE’ MUSEUMS: A MORE RECENT DEVELOPMENT...... 76
CONCLUSION...... 101
BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 105
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ABSTRACT
This thesis examines how the development of popular culture museums happened as private individuals and organizations wanted to display their collections in a public forum. I studied magazines, journals, and newspaper coverage to ascertain why popular culture museums emerged. To see how popular culture museums reached the public, analysis of local area websites, tour guides, press releases, and other popular media was also researched. No specialized research had been done on popular culture museums as a whole previously. This thesis argued that as more popular culture museums opened, they transformed from being primarily object focused to narrative focused, at the same time that museums and popular culture studies fields professionalized. The opening of popular culture museums helped validate the academic field of popular culture by exposing the serious side of the topic, while the popular culture research by academics provided the basis of interpretation in museums. Similarly, the emphasis on fun and pleasure in popular culture museums helped other types of museums to become more visitor friendly, playful places, while the popular culture museums still served a larger purpose by preserving the history of their subject.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks go to my parents for their constant love and encouragement. I know my parents will celebrate the completion of this thesis as much as I will. I also want to thank my brother, grandparents, coworkers, and friends who kept asking about my thesis. Thank you for helping me along the way. Thank you to my fellow students for their friendship and support. I am particularly grateful to my “person” Christine Jamet-Lamberton for keeping me focused when I needed it and distracted when I needed that too, and for providing friendship and support during my time in Wilmington.
Many thanks to my thesis reading group that helped me develop my thesis. We were each other’s biggest cheerleaders and critics. Your advice, help, constructive criticism, and passion have helped to shape the public historian I am and my work today.
I would like to thank the Interlibrary Loan office staff at University of North Carolina
Wilmington that helped me track down all the news articles pertaining to popular culture museums. Without their help I never would have been able to find the information to make my thesis possible. I also wish to thank the faculty and staff of the Department of History, for their encouragement and enthusiasm in my career as a graduate student. Particularly, I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to Tammy Grady for providing kind, encouraging words when I needed them and always pointing me in the right direction when I had questions.
Lastly, I would like to thank my thesis committee: Tammy Gordon, Candice Bredbenner, and
Glen Harris. Dr. Gordon’s extensive knowledge and zeal for public history was inspirational to her students and motivated me when I needed it most. Without Tammy’s insight and support I would never have been able to understand what I wanted to say. Many thanks to Dr. Bredbenner and Dr. Harris for the support and constructive feedback that challenged me to further explore
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my themes and conclusions.
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DEDICATION
For Mum and Terry.
Thank you for all your love, support, encouragement, and nagging.
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LIST OF FIUGRES
Figure Page
1. Locations of Look at Me Reliquary Popular Culture Museums...... 21
2. Buffalo Bill Museum And Grave...... 23
3. Country Music Hall Of Fame And Museum ...... 25
4. Delta Blues Museum...... 32
5. Cartoon Art Museum ...... 40
6. Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame And Museum ...... 42
7. Locations of Variety Popular Culture Museums ...... 50
8. McDonald’s Museum ...... 51
9. New Orleans Voodoo Museum...... 53
10. Fairmount Historical Museum ...... 55
11. Ava Gardner Museum...... 57
12. Houdini Historical Society...... 60
13. Museum of Comic And Cartoon Art ...... 63
14. Spam Museum ...... 65
15. Geppi’s Entertainment Museum ...... 68
16. Charles M. Schulz Museum And Research Center...... 70
17. Locations Of ‘Experience’ Popular Culture Museums...... 77
18. Newseum ...... 78
19. Eisner Museum Of Advertising And Design...... 81
20. Experience Music Project ...... 83
21. Science Fiction Museum...... 85
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22. International Spy Museum...... 87
23. Pirate Soul Museum...... 90
24. Harley-Davidson Museum...... 93
25. Grammy Museum ...... 95
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CHAPTER 1 IN THE BEGINNING: THE EXISTING LITERATURE
Popular culture includes the ideas, attitudes, images, sounds, and videos that dominate mainstream culture. According to Steve Geppi, owner of Diamond Comic Distributors and founder of Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, the contributions of popular culture not only teach about politics, innovations, and culture, but also provide “relief in times of trouble.”1 Popular culture was heavily influenced by mass media and infused into everyday life through comic books, television, and the Internet, just to name a few. Popular culture has even become an academic field, coming from a mix of communication and cultural studies, which concentrated on a critical theory perspective.2 Popular culture studies programs and museums developed concurrently. Popular culture covered a broad range of subjects. For the purpose of this thesis, popular culture museums were museums that dealt with music, art forms, film, entertainment, food, people, advertising, and automobiles through displaying objects or trying to tell a story. All popular culture museums provided fun because popular culture was about pleasure. Popular culture became popular culture because people enjoy and talk about it.
While there were many different aspects of popular culture, there were two types of popular culture museums: reliquary and ‘experience.’ While some museums had aspects of both, reliquary museums were focused on a singular specific topic that displayed objects and information primarily and ‘experience’ museums used objects and information to tell a story.
Popular culture museums are unique because when visitors went to them they learned about, as well as participated in popular culture. While popular culture museums included elements of history museums, art museums, and science centers, all of the different types of museums in one
1 Gabriella Boston, “Museum Looks at Pop Culture,” The Washington Times (D.C.) 29 October 2006. 2 Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Berkley: University of California Press, 1991), 1-2.
emphasize the consumption of mass culture in popular culture museums. Art museums often focused on the exceptional and individual but popular culture museums that emphasized art did so with mass culture through comics on superheroes or popular advertisements featuring celebrities. When history museums focused on mass culture they did it through economy, politics, and society; popular culture museums did it through elements that people recognized from everyday life. Popular culture museums were similar to science centers through the technology available to the visitors and the activities they provided. At both popular culture museums and science centers, visitors interacted with what they were learning about. Popular culture museums were unique and need to be studied as a unique type of museum. Popular culture museums were part museum, part art, and part shrine.
This thesis examined how the development of popular culture museums happened as private individuals and organizations wanted to display their collections in a public forum.
Surveying magazines, journals, and newspaper coverage helped to ascertain why popular culture museums emerged. To see how popular culture reached the pubic, analysis of local area websites, tour guides, press releases, and other popular media was also researched. Although there were numerous museums that fell in the realm of popular culture from Experience Music
Project in Seattle, Washington to the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum in New Orleans,
Louisiana, no specialized research had been done on popular culture museums as a whole; all analysis was site specific. This thesis also covered the concurrent development of popular culture studies programs and museums. This thesis argued that as more popular culture museums opened, they transformed from being primarily object focused to narrative focused, at the same time as museums and popular culture studies fields professionalized. History museums went through the same transformation from object focused interpretation to telling a story but popular
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culture museums also began incorporating hands on activities that allowed visitors to participate in popular culture, similar to the way visitors at science centers did experiments. In addition, professionalization of the museum field and professionalization of the popular culture field happened simultaneously. The opening of popular culture museums helped validated the academic field of popular culture by exposing the serious side of the topic, while the popular culture research by academics provided the basis for interpretation in museums. Similarly, the emphasis on fun and pleasure in popular culture museums helped other types of museums become more visitor friendly, playful places, while still serving a larger purpose by preserving the history of their subject. Ultimately, this thesis presented an understanding of how popular culture museums surfaced through an analysis of popular culture museums beginning in 1921.
The first chapter of this thesis, “In the Beginning: The Existing Literature,” examined the literature pertaining to museum studies, visitor studies, the history of how museums changed, and the study of popular culture. Chapter two, “Look at Me Reliquary Museums: The Beginning of Popular Culture Museums,” focused on some of the earliest popular culture museums and how they developed because enthusiasts were interested in preserving what they were passionate about. The third chapter, “Variety: Popular Culture Museums from Here to There,” examined a selection of popular culture museums that specialized on specific popular culture themes and primarily display objects and information. Chapter four, “‘Experience’ Museums: A More
Recent Development,” introduced the museums that told a story through their exhibits and try to produce a feeling. The conclusion, “Transformers: Popular Culture Museums Through Time,” explained how some popular culture museums had transformed over time to enhance visitor experience and that future research needs to be done on popular culture museums as a whole rather than individual institutions.
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In 1957, Freeman Tilden published Interpreting Our Heritage the first book to discuss the philosophy behind interpretation with the goal of making successful instructors out of the museum curators and park superintendents at whom the book was aimed. Tilden emphasized the difference between classroom education where there was a captive audience and “elective education” where there was not. According to Tilden, interpretation was “an educational activity which aimed to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by first- hand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply communicate factual information.”3 Tilden developed six principles that were essential to interpretation (1)
Interpretation that was not related to what was being shown would be sterile; (2) Information was not interpretation, but information was included in interpretation; (3) Interpretation was an art that includes many other arts; (4) The focus of interpretation should be provocation not instruction; (5) Interpretation should present the whole, not a part; (6) When working with children under 12, interpretation should not be diluted but follow a different approach. The best interpretation could only be the beginning and create a continuing interest. Interpreting Our
Heritage was an early text on the professionalization of museums when it was originally published in 1957. It helped set the standards for interpretation as museums transitioned away from showing objects with only basic information.
Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums by
Edward P. Alexander also became a standard text for museum studies when it was published in
1979. Alexander explained what different types of museums were including art, history, natural history, children’s, and science and how museums functioned, but he did not include popular culture museums as a separate type of institution. In 1870, the founding of three distinguished museums – the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
3 Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 33.
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York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston – set the standard for museums in the United
States and by 1900, American museums became centers for education, as well as logical and rational thought.4 Alexander stated that museums communicated by interpretation or teaching through the use of original objects. This interpretation complemented a rational process of learning through words or verbalization.5 Interpretation relied heavily on sensory perception to enable the museumgoer to emotionally experience objects. This emotional experience was what newer popular culture museums such as the Pirate Soul Museum and International Spy Museum tried to create.
Alexander explained the priorities assigned to the different museum departments were important in establishing the essence of any museum. Its board of trustees, directors, curators, educational staff, conservators, designers, and other specialists should all consider its basic purposes, as well as try to find more successful ways of achieving them. A good museum was conscious of all purposes (traditional and educational) and devised programs and activities as its collections staff and resources allowed. The basic problem of a history museum was how to convey understanding of a dynamic, continuous flow of human existence, not just great men and great events. Museums needed to address economic, social, and cultural factors and communicate this information.6 Popular culture museums such as Geppi’s Entertainment
Museum and Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art embraced these methods. According to
Alexander, “an abundance of young academically trained historians seeking employment outside the academy added to the impact of these intellectual changes on history museums.”7
4 Edward P. Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Function of Museums (Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History, 1979), 7. 5 Alexander, Museums in Motion, 7. 6 Alexander, Museums in Motion, 114. 7 Alexander, Museums in Motion, 114.
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Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian, edited by Amy
Henderson and Adrienne Kaeppler and published just after the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1997, was one of few museum studies books that dealt directly with popular culture. It focused on the transition from simply displaying objects in
“cabinet of curiosities” at the founding of the institution to museum exhibits presenting interpretations about the “origins, meaning, and value of objects, as well as theories about the thoughts and behavior of the people who made them and used them.”8 The curators, historians, exhibit specialists, and educators from the Smithsonian compiled essays dealing with the dilemmas of representation and curatorship.9
Each essay was written by a member of the Smithsonian staff and deals with an issue of representation or curatorship. The issue of how to present the recent past in exhibits was a focal point of more than a few essays. World War II: Sharing Memories encouraged visitors to include their own memories as part of the exhibit in spiral bound books with “Share Your Memories” written on the front. Sitting for Justice: The Greensboro Sit-in of 1960 dealt with procurement of the Woolworth lunch counter without leaving the impression that the National Museum of
American History was out to take what they wanted and leave the community members of
Greensboro, N.C., without an extremely significant piece of local Greensboro history in lieu of the national history of the civil rights movement.10
Each author dealt with the procurement of objects and how to represent them whether through photographs, text, music, art, or drawings. The creation of the exhibit took into account the point of view of outside interest while setting the tone of an exhibit and placing objects in
8 Amy Henderson and Adrienne L Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representations at the Smithsonian (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 1. 9 Henderson and Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas. 10 Henderson and Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas.
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their position of the past. William Yeingst and Lonnie Bunch wrote that “presenting the history of the living means treading on dreams and wrestling with recollections both cherished and painful.”11 Similar issues also present themselves when dealing with popular culture museums because popular culture was often part of the recent past.
The article “The Unstifled Muse: The ‘All in the Family’ Exhibit and Popular Culture at the National Museum of American History” by Ellen Roney Hughes examined the realm of television and the place of popular culture icons such as the Bunkers chairs and the ‘MASH’ set at the ‘Nation’s Museum.’12 According to Hughes, the inclusion of the ‘All in the Family’ memorabilia by the Smithsonian indicated a change in what had previously been included in history museums in the late 1970s.13 Hughes wrote, “more than simply lowbrow joins highbrow, popular entertainment artifact exhibits at the American History Museum detonated an unprecedented endorsement of popular culture as an appropriate subject for a national cultural institution.”14 When the Smithsonian began the inclusion of national popular culture it was a shift toward social and cultural history and away from military and technological history.15 Many people at the American History Museum, staff and visitors alike, were uncertain about whether popular culture was historic or substantive enough to support a convincing interpretation of the
American past.16 The ‘All in the Family’ artifacts included two chairs, one table, a doily, an ashtray, and two mock beer cans as “a leading example of situation comedy, a dominant type of
American television show; as a pivotal show that caused change in the genre; as revealing of
11 Henderson and Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas, 152. 12 Henderson and Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas, 7. 13 Henderson and Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas, 156. 14 Henderson and Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas, 156. 15 Henderson and Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas, 156. 16 Henderson and Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas, 157.
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common beliefs, values and behaviors in American life during the 1970s; and as a widely shared
American cultural experience with passionate fans and detractors.”17
There were complaints about the inclusion of popular culture artifacts in the museum.
Some complained because they felt that television was not important, some because they didn’t like ‘All in the Family’ specifically, and a few because they were puzzled.18 All of the complaints helped to illustrate the power of popular culture artifacts in museums to
“communicate ideas directly and powerfully to the public as a possible threat to the established social and political order.”19
George E. Hein, in Learning in the Museum, argued, “what is learned in museums and how learning takes place is more than a matter of intellectual curiosity. Learning in the museum and understanding visitors’ learning has become a matter for survival for museums.”20 He began with the assertion that by understanding how others learn and promoting learning more effectively, museums and their educational programming would grow. Published in 1988,
Learning in the Museum proved to further professionalize the museum field by revealing that visitors had short attention spans and that there were different types of visitors.21
In Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions, Kathleen McLean identified visitor types as well and provided an understanding of the different elements needed to design effective exhibitions including industrial, graphic, and interior design, edited writing, psychology, and management. McLean argued, “if we want exhibitions to be truly engaging, then all exhibit professionals, not only the educators and evaluators, will have to be communicators and
17 Henderson and Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas, 158. 18 Henderson and Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas, 164. 19 Henderson and Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas, 169. 20 George E. Hein, Learning in the Museum (London: Routledge, 1988), 12. 21 Hein, Learning in the Museum.
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audience advocates.”22 Addressing multiple learning styles and providing more and more interactive exhibits appeals to more museum visitors.23 Current ‘experience’ museums such as
Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum practice a great deal of McLean’s 1993 concepts regarding technology appealed to a greater number of visitors.
The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, a collection of essays by Tony
Bennett argued that the establishment of museums open to all was part of a larger development by the government to enlist culture to civilize the population. The formation and operation of the museum comprised the first section, the political ramifications of contemporary museum policy and practice in the second section, and in the final section the ways museums and exhibitions illustrate ideas about progress. Museums were transformed from private collections to open public spaces. Cabinets of curiosities became displays of objects with information provided to explain the objects. According to Bennett, “the formation of the exhibitionary complex involved a break with both in effecting the transfer of significant quantities of cultural and scientific property from private into public ownership where they were housed within institutions administered by the state for the benefit of an extended general public.”24 Bennett stated that in the late 18th and early 19th century museums were started because they were “useful for governing”25 by influencing thought and exhibitions met needs for ideological requirements.26
The process of museum formations was complex and a transformation of earlier practices of collecting institutions.
22 Kathleen McLean, Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions (Washington, DC: Association of Science- Technology Centers, 1993), ix. 23 McLean, Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions. 24 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 73. 25 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 19. 26 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 80.
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Museums were a place of ‘high culture’ and a “resource that might be used to regulate the field of social behavior in endowing individuals with new capacities for self-monitoring.”27 Shop assistants at department stores were from the working class needed rough edges smoothed to serve a more affluent class.28 Part of the smoothing happened through exposure to museums of art and history. Museums were able to influence and manipulate the emerging middle class by using high culture to “alter forms of life and behavior.”29
The Midway also ordered public behavior in a similar way to museums and department stores according to Bennett. Chicago’s Columbian Exhibition Midway (popular fair zone) in
1893 was influenced by museum practices and in turn was the inspiration for the Coney Island amusement park. Bennett stated there were other ways activities at fairs, museums and exhibitions overlapped. The founding collections of many major museums were given by international exhibitions; crowd control techniques developed at exhibitions influenced the design and layout of amusement parks; and nineteenth century natural history museums received many specimens from animal collecting agencies used by PT Barnum.30 Barnum was unquestionably part of popular culture in the 19th century. Elements from museums found their way into popular culture even when museums were still very much part of ‘high culture.’
In 1998, a survey ten years in the making, led by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, produced answers on Americans approach to learning about history in The Presence of the Past:
Popular Uses of History in American Life. Rosenzweig and Thelen discovered through their research that a broader audience understood history drastically different than historians. The assumption that the broader audience would identify with a national narrative turned out to be
27 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 20. 28 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 31. 29 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 20. 30 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 5.
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incorrect when they were asked how the interviewees learned about history, where they went to learn about history, who they asked about history, and what type of history they enjoyed.31
The survey was composed of 1500 people across the United States. Using the term past to interviewees was able to evoke the most honest and genuine answers from the people interviewed about family, whereas heritage and tradition brought the warm, fuzzy feelings to the surface, not where people had come from and what they had learned from the past. The open ended questions asked by interviewers showed the past was something that was all encompassing for the people that were interviewed, that Americans understood history in how it related to their own past, not as taught in school. Good news for popular culture museums, since popular culture was often part of the recent past. Those surveyed explained their interest in the past as something that enveloped them, but their reference to the past was not what most historians would call history. History, as expressed in textbooks, is not usually so emotional and personal.32
History was an untrustworthy subject for many people because of their mistrust of media and textbooks; however museums were considered the most trustworthy source of historical information among respondents. To the wider audience, historians appear to be out of touch with how people connect with the past. Textbooks cannot present history in a personal way, which was how most relate to the past, so people turn to ways of “popular historymaking” because there was value in seeing an honest representation of all people. Americans take photos to remember their own past, watch movies and TV shows about topics in the past, and may be part of a preservation group of some sort. 33 Popular culture museums became trustworthy place, to
31 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 32 Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past. 33 Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past.
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learn history because popular culture was often placed into a larger context and people related to subjects in a personal way.
In Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture by George Lipsitz, he wrote, “the desire to connect to history, the impulse to pose present problems in historical terms, and the assertion of a temporal and social reality beyond one’s immediate experience pervade popular culture in significant ways.”34 In his text on collective memory and popular culture in the United States since 1945, Lipsitz explored how the two topics were linked and how electronic mass media created a crisis for collective memory. He also studied how collective memory framed the production and reception of commercial culture.35 Lipsitz believed that historical memories and evidence were no longer solely the provenance of archives and libraries; but that they saturated popular culture and public dialogue as well.36
The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective by Hilde S. Hein in 2000 had a different approach than most museum studies texts. She examined “the shift away from object centeredness to an emphasis on the promotion of experiences,” and explores the implications for museums.37 Promotion of experiences was a common practice in popular culture museums. Hein made her personal preference known, that objects were full of life and information and that object-based exhibits were more persuasive than experimental exhibits. Hein argued that museums had shifted their focus from objects to experiences. Objects were used as evidence to help create the experience. Exhibitions that Hein used to explore her argument include From
Field to Factory, a permanent exhibit from the National Museum of American History on the
34 George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 36. 35 Lipsitz, Time Passages, vii. 36 Lipsitz, Time Passages, 36. 37 Hilde S. Hein, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), ix.
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migration of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North; Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society; and Enola Gay, the 1995 exhibit by the National Air and
Space Museum. Hein critiqued the exhibit experience by comparing it, in some cases, to theme parks due the techniques that museums had developed over the last fifteen years.38
Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and are Changed, a collection of essays edited by Simon Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, and Sheila Watson, explored how museums were influenced and how they themselves attempted to influence the world around them. The text helped to understand the past, present, and future of the museum. Through the essays the editors argued, “museums are constantly in flux.”39 The evolution of popular culture museums from one of the earliest, the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave in 1921 to the Grammy Museum in 2008 and all of the others in between, showed just how true that was. A product of a conference, some of the essays focused on advancements in the museum and others discussed how museums affected their communities and how museums were changed as well. Museum Revolutions had a significant focus on museum ethics as well, with the politics involved in representation, ecomuseums, social responsibility, repatriation, and treatment of human remains.40
As this professional literature on museums developed, so did the academic study of popular culture. Both bodies of literature had a validating effect that assisted the establishment of popular culture museums. In 1967, Ray B. Browne established the Journal of Popular Culture and the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Bowling Green,
Ohio, followed by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture at BGSU in 1968. The next year,
Browne founded the BGSU Popular Press and the Popular Culture Association and in 1972, the
38 Hein, The Museum in Transition. 39 Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, and Shelia Watson, Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and are Changed (London: Routledge, 2007), xxv. 40 Knell, MacLeod, and Watson, Museum Revolutions.
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Department of Popular Culture at BGSU, as well as the Journal of American Culture and the
American Culture Association in 1978.41
Browne began his academic career studying English literature as a student at the
University of Alabama in 1943. After World War II, he enrolled at Columbia University for his
M.A. and later UCLA, where he pursued his Ph.D. in American literature, folklore, and history.
While teaching in the English Department at the University of Maryland, Browne met Carl Bode, a founder of the American Studies Association, and delved further into his interest in American
Studies. Bode was one of a rising number of scholars who believed that “academia needed inter and multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of the humanities and of literature.”42
In 1967, Browne accepted a folklore position at Bowling Green State University after a few brief years at Purdue University in Indiana. To the disapproval of his colleagues in the
English Department, Browne began to introduce popular culture into the curriculum of his folklore classes. At this time popular culture was common in life but not in academic forums. It was perceived as an inferior form of academic study. He chaired the separate Department of
Popular Culture starting in 1971. Browne created an academic center for the study of popular culture at BGSU that advocated an approach to avoid the exclusive thinking widespread in academic research and during his life he wrote or co-edited fifty-plus books, numerous articles and reviews and in 2003, the Popular Culture Library at BGSU was renamed the Ray and Pat
Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies for Browne and his wife.43 During an interview with
41 2002 Americana: The Institute for the Study of American Popular Culture, “Conversation with Professor Ray B. Browne /Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 1900-Present;” available from http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/browne.htm; Internet; accessed 25 January 2010. 42 “BGSU :: Pop Culture Library :: PCL MS-107: Ray B. Browne Collection;” available from http://www.bgsu.edu/colleges/library/pcl/page43458.html; Internet; accessed 25 January 2010. 43 “PCL MS-107: Ray B. Browne Collection;” Internet; accessed 25 January 2010.
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the Journal of American Popular Culture in 2002, Browne asserted that the study of popular culture was significant because,
increasingly our culture is coming to realize that the proper study
of a democratic society is its democratic cultures and practices, all.
Some may be more desirable and respectable, but as Lincoln might
have said, some cultures are desirable to some of the people some
of the time and as such they are valuable as evidence of that
segment of society. This evidence is clearly visible now in the
interest we are seeing among archeologists who are digging around
in tombs of the dead, not looking for gold but for everyday
artifacts.44
Currently, BGSU is still the only university with a Popular Culture Department and now has twelve instructors and professors. Ray Browne died October 22, 2009, at home in Bowling
Greene at age 87. Browne developed the most lasting definition of popular culture:
Popular culture is the way of life in which and by which most
people in any society live. In a democracy like the United States, it
is the voice of the people — their likes and dislikes — that form
the lifeblood of daily existence, of a way of life. Popular culture is
the voice of democracy, democracy speaking and acting, the
seedbed in which democracy grows. Popular culture democratizes
society and makes democracy truly democratic. It is the everyday
world around us: the mass media, entertainments, and diversions. It
is our heroes, icons, rituals, everyday actions, psychology, and
44 2002 Americana, “Conversation with Professor Ray B. Browne;” Internet; accessed 25 January 2010.
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religion — our total life picture. It is the way of living we inherit,
practice and modify as we please, and how we do it. It is the
dreams we dream while asleep.45
Popular Culture: An Introduction by Carla Freccero was one of few popular culture texts that was not just a compilation of essays on popular culture from many different authors and fields of study. Freccero explained why popular culture should be studied and how it was taught in classrooms. According to Freccero, “culture as a whole, what sometimes called ‘popular culture’ in the United States, already studies popular culture, that is, enlists it to explicate, argue, demonstrate, condemn, or praise this or that event or social phenomenon.”46 Popular culture was a commodity; it could produce political and cultural debates. Popular culture could influence and reflect values and beliefs, as well as advocate and condemn.47 Freccero maintained “as long as popular culture remains a degraded cultural form in the minds of liberal educators and students themselves, it will be available for use without analysis, much the way religion and morality are invoked in the U.S. public culture as givens without meanings that are subject to contestation.”48
In 2004, A History of Popular Culture: More of Everything, Faster and Brighter by
Raymond Betts provided a thematic history of popular culture since World War II. Betts argued that popular culture had four characteristics: visualization, commoditization, entertainment and technology. Betts examined the emergence of modern popular culture, effects of conflict, urbanization, changing politics, development of contemporary music culture, film, television, and sports as a commercial endeavor. Contemporary popular culture was difficult to define because it included all subjects. According to Betts, “what most obviously sets contemporary
45 2002 Americana, “Conversation with Professor Ray B. Browne;” Internet; accessed 25 January 2010. 46 Carla Freccero, Popular Culture: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 2. 47 Freccero, Popular Culture, 3. 48 Freccero, Popular Culture, 4.
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popular culture apart from anything preceding it is the mass-produced means of pleasure and entertainment that are now being enjoyed by multitudes never reached before.”49 Popular culture was about market-directed interests and intended to produce large profits and did not include folk-like activities on the sidelines.50 ‘Experience’ popular culture museums had the same intentions. Betts asserted in conclusion that “popular culture is the first cultural form to compress so many activities previously considered distinct, to engage diverse groups and classes of people so widely in a common environment: in front of the television screen, at the theme park, in the shopping mall, on the computer.”51
Dominic Strinati, in An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture, answered questions dealing with how to study popular culture. Strinati used the examples of popular Hollywood cinema and British television because “they proved to be popular and powerful commercial mass media during the twentieth century and have played a leading and determinant role in the production and consumption of popular culture.”52 Strinati stated that the general purpose of the book was to provide a general introduction of the study of popular culture and that the study needed to involve more than just the reading of texts. According to Strinati, “studying popular culture comes down to explaining popular culture.”53 Popular culture was usually introduced, or rather produced, because it was a commodity that had the potential to be profitable. Strinati contended popular cinema and popular culture were dominated by large corporations and
“domination is exercised by massive global conglomerates that control or influence many media outlets and types of popular culture.”54 Strinati argued that it was the style, not substance, of
49 Raymond F. Betts, A History of Popular Culture: More for Everything, Faster and Brighter (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 50 Betts, A History of Popular Culture, 1. 51 Betts, A History of Popular Culture, 147. 52 Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture (London, Routledge, 2000), xiv. 53 Strinati, An Introduction to Studying, 258. 54 Strinati, An Introduction to Studying, 252.
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consumption that matters, “this is apparent in popular culture, where surfaces and style, jokes and playfulness, and referencing and irreverence take precedence over such qualities as content, substance, narrative and meaning.”55 Although popular culture was about style over substance, popular culture literature was about substance.
There was an abundance of literature on the professionalization of museums; but none go into the differences of different types of museums. In Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of
History in American Life, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen argued that people trust museums most when they want to learn about the past. Was the same true of popular culture museums? If visitors’ expectations were shaped by consumer culture and tradition as suggested by Susan
Crane, a University of Texas history professor who focused her research on thematic issues of collective memory and historical consciousness, then does that help explain the appeal of content that was easily available outside of museums as well?56 While knowing how collections developed, that there were different types of learners, and that museums were considered a trustworthy place to learn about the past does not directly help to answer the question of why popular culture museums developed; however, they do help in understanding how museums evolved and provided a background on museums when the sources were examined together.
Authors such as Edward Alexander, George Hein, Kathleen McLean, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen had thoroughly examined museum visitors and how museums adapted to reach the visitor. What authors had not done was investigate popular culture museums. Popular culture was not studied because popular culture has not been a respectable area of study for long, if ever.
The lack of literature on popular culture museums illustrated that further research needed to be done on how popular culture museums emerged and how they combined aspects of art and
55 Strinati, An Introduction to Studying, 234. 56 Crane, “Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum,” 47.
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history museums, as well as science centers. None has been done before with exception of the article “The Unstifled Muse: The ‘All in the Family’ Exhibit and Popular Culture at the National
Museum of American History” by Ellen Roney Hughes. Research into specific museums such as the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
Museum in Cleveland, Ohio opened to increase tourism. The McDonald’s Museum in Des
Plaines, Illinois, opened in 1985 as a recreation of the first McDonald’s that opened in 1955. The
Harley-Davidson Museum opened in 2008 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, also commemorated a consumer product.
Popular culture museums were different than other history or art museums because of their specific focus and they included both history and art. By studying popular culture museums we can learn about history as well as what people were surrounded by, because popular culture museums often place the items of popular culture into the larger historical context. This thesis could help public historians by illustrating that transformations of museums could revitalize the content for visitors. This thesis can also teach public historians that popular culture museums were unique institutions that were worthy of specialized study.
The opening of popular culture museums helped validate the field of popular culture, and the academic study of popular culture provided the basis of interpretation. There are no other surveys of popular culture museums like this thesis but there were a few articles that analyze particular popular culture museums. This thesis argued that as more popular culture museums opened they transformed from being primarily object focused to telling a story, at the same time as museums and popular culture studies fields professionalized. In addition, professionalization of the museum field and professionalization of the popular culture field happened simultaneously. While popular culture museums should always provide fun, because popular
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culture was about pleasure, they should also be studied as educational institutions, because they were not frivolous in purpose. The museumification of popular culture helped validate the academic study of popular culture, while popular culture research provided the basis of interpretation. Similarly, the emphasis on fun and pleasure in popular culture museums helped other types of museums to become more visitor friendly, playful places. While popular culture museums had elements of history museums, art museums, and science centers, they are unique and need to be studied as a distinct type of museum. Ultimately, this thesis presents an understanding of how popular culture museums surfaced through an analysis of early, middle, and current popular culture museums starting in 1921.
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CHAPTER 2 LOOK AT ME RELIQUARY MUSEUMS: THE BEGINNING OF POPULAR CULTURE MUSEUMS
While Ray Browne was at the forefront of the academic field of popular culture in the late 1960s, museums focused on music, film, and even cartoons started to open across the United
States. While some popular culture museums, such as the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave had already opened, a great deal were founded in the 1970s as shrines by aficionados of particular types of popular culture. Seven popular culture museums were the focus of this chapter. The museums may not have been the first or the most professional, but they represented different parts of the United States (figure 1). The museums were also chosen because they represented different types of popular culture: entertainment, music, film, and art. The museums representing different types of popular culture show that a wide variety of popular culture museums were developing and gaining in popularity.
Figure 1 Locations of case studies. The popular culture museums in this chapter were: (1) Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave, which educated visitors on Buffalo Bill and his Wild West shows; (2) the Country Music Hall of
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Fame and Museum, focused on the achievements made in country music; (3) the New York Jazz
Museum, spotlighted rare photos, instruments, paintings, and jazz memorabilia; (4) the Delta
Blues Museum, focused on preserving the history of the blues musical traditions; (5) the
Museum of Broadcasting, emphasized on acquiring broadcasts representing American commercial broadcasting, including television and radio; (6) the Cartoon Art Museum, centered their efforts on preserving and documenting a unique art form; and (7) the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame and Museum, highlighted the history of rock and roll. These reliquary museums were object focused when they opened and together they demonstrated that popular culture museums started gaining in popularity starting in the 1960s and momentum grew from there.
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Figure 2 Buffalo Bill Cody’s grave at the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave on Lookout Mountain in Golden, Colorado. One of the earliest popular culture museums was the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave
(figure 2). The museum was started by Johnny Baker, Buffalo Bill’s foster son and a marksman with the Wild West shows, to house keepsakes from Buffalo Bill’s life and the Wild West shows.
Because of his familial relationship with Buffalo Bill, Baker was able to collect items from
Cody’s life, as well as a large collection of Wild West show posters. Visitors to the museum could see a lock of Buffalo Bill’s hair, his silver mounted saddle, the buckskins he wore in the
Wild West show, the outfit he wore in his final performance on November 11, 1916, and the last
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cartridge he ever fired from a gun. Exhibits included a historical timeline of Buffalo Bill’s life and an exhibit on his relationship with American Indians.57
According to his widow Louisa, Buffalo Bill chose the location because of its view. The grave was built with rough-hewn stones, and the tombstone had fragrant ponderosa pines close by and looked out over rough peaks. According to museum director Steve Friesen, “in the 1920s a group of Lakota Sioux warriors visited and placed Indian head/buffalo nickels on the grave in tribute to Buffalo Bill…People continue to throw money on the grave, probably thinking it might give them luck, just like throwing money in a wishing well. There is also a story of single women throwing bobby pins on the grave in hopes it will help them get married.”58
The original museum was in a large spruce log cabin named Pahaska Tepee. Pahaska meant Long Hair, a name given to Buffalo Bill by the Sioux Indians. The city of Denver took over care of the museum in 1957, and built a modern building for the artifacts in 1979. Pahaska
Tepee became a café and gift shop where visitors could purchase Americana and Wild West memorabilia. Today, the museum honors his life with regular annual events such as a birthday party and in some years, a re-enactment of Cody’s burial with a grieving widow and cavalry.59
57 Michelle Lovric, Cowgirls, Cockroaches, and Celebrity Lingerie: The World’s Most Unusual Museums (Thirplow, Cambridge: Icon Books Ltd., 2007), 208-209; “Buffalo Bill Memorial Museum and Grave,” Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave press release, Contact: Steve Friesen, available from Buffalo Bill Museum website, http://www.buffalobill.org, accessed on 14 July 2010. 58 Lovric, Cowgirls, Cockroaches, and Celebrity Lingerie, 207. 59 “Buffalo Bill Memorial Museum and Grave,” Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave press release.
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Figure 3 Sweet Dreams: The Nashville Sound exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. The Country Music Association announced its plans in 1961 to open the Country Music
Hall of Fame and Museum (figure 3), a reliquary museum started by enthusiasts, not unlike the
Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave. The CMA was a trade association arranged to publicize country music in 1958. Two years later, the CMA publicized plans for the museum to be built on Music
Row in Nashville, Tennessee. Also in 1963, the state of Tennessee set up the Country Music
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Foundation, Inc. as an educational non-profit to operate the museum.60 The original museum opened on April 1, 1967, with a building that cost $750,000 donated by individuals and institutions within the music industry.61
In 1968, the Country Music Foundation Library opened with the mission to study and interpret “country music’s past through the display of artifacts and the collection and dissemination of data found on discs, tape, film and in printed material.”62 The library was located below the museum and by October 1981, the four thousand square foot space held more than thirteen thousand books and periodicals, and ninety thousand records, audio, and videotapes. There was also sheet music, fan club publications, and thousands of photographs and news clippings. The costumes of different performers in the museum’s collection were used in the 1979 exhibit highlighting the importance and history of costumes in country music. The library also started an ongoing oral history project that recorded the memories of performers and industry business leaders. The library was open to researchers but not the general public. At the time the museum opened, it was so original they had many difficulties organizing their collection. The library had to develop its own subject headings; there was no Library of Congress or other cataloging system in existence for the topic.63
Exhibits in the museum got the same care and attention as the materials in the library by staff. The library was in the basement of the original building and provided a majority of the information and material for the exhibits. Diane Johnsons, the museum director, spent her time researching different ideas for exhibits in concurrence with studies by the public relations
60 The Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum is operated by the Country Music Foundation, Inc., “Mission:: Country Music Hall of Fame;” available from http://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/mission/; Internet; accessed 25 January 2010. 61 “Country Music Foundation operates the Hall of Fame,” Billboard 26 February 1972, 2. 62 “Country Music Foundation operates the Hall of Fame,” 2. 63 Lisa Harbatkin, “Country Music’s Hall of Fame and Archive,” Bluegrass Unlimited 16 (October 1981): 27-28.
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department on what people wanted to see. The audience had been identified as three different groups: one scholarly, one casual, and one “that would be happy with Johnny Cash’s left boot.”64
Since the opening of the museum in 1961 to 1981, attendance grew twenty percent annually. In
1981, there were over half a million visitors annually. In 1977, the museum space expanded from ten to seventeen thousand square feet to help handle the growing attendance. The library had both permanent and special collections that preserved the history of country music and current trends. Exhibits heavily emphasized the performers, as well as the importance of those behind the scenes. The exhibits traced the progress of commercial country music through a series of dioramas and collages. Artifacts displayed included Carter Stanley’s guitar and instruments from other performers, with the history of the exhibits going back to the evolution and construction of the basic folk instruments. There was also an interactive exhibit that allowed visitors to enjoy plucking guitar strings, bowing the fiddle, and playing the piano. According to Harbatkin, “some of the exhibits may appeal more to the casual looker, some of the more serious, but most people will find something of interest in nearly all of them.”65
The New York Jazz Museum served as a shrine to jazz musicians; similar to the Country
Music Hall of Fame and Museum service to country musicians. Both museums were started by those already enamored with the topic. The New York Jazz Museum a museum where there was something for everyone started by jazz aficionados. The museum opened at the beginning of the post-Civil Rights period and was about preserving and celebrating jazz culture. The New York
Jazz Museum in New York City opened on June 16, 1972, five years after the Country Music
Hall of Fame and Museum, in a one-story carriage house among the skyscrapers. The museum’s first press release outlined the opening, as well as the future plans of the museum. The release
64 Harbatkin, “Country Music’s Hall of Fame and Archive,” 29. 65 Harbatkin, “Country Music’s Hall of Fame and Archive,” 29.
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stated that the museum was open six days a week from noon until 8pm to “students, tourists, and jazz buffs.”66 The museum displays included rare photos, paintings, instruments, and jazz memorabilia. Also included were tapes of music; musicians’ memories; and daily showings jazz films, including “Jazz Panorama,” the museums outline of Jazz history. The museum was formed by the New York HOT Jazz Society but included all aspects of jazz including “history, legend, and legacy.”67
Howard Fischer served as the executive director and Jack Bradley as managing director of the new museum. The planning and organization of the museum was funded by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. The museum planned to raise additional funds through the jazz sales shop, where new and used records were offered alongside books, periodicals, photos, posters, and jazz novelty items.68
On June 15, 1972 the museum hosted a preview before it officially opened the next day.
The party overflowed onto the street and invitees included people from the press, TV media, and radio. The first exhibition honored the late Louis Armstrong, former President of the New York
Hot Jazz Society. The walls were covered in Armstrong memorabilia and photographs. Seventy- five photos traced over six decades of his life and a whole wall was covered with his record covers, show posters, Christmas cards, personal letters, even diet charts and laundry bills. The party also hosted a “live jam session” with top jazz stars including Lionel Hampton, Tryree
Glenn, Joe Muranyn, Roger Glenn, Joe Thomas, and Marty Napoleon.69
At the opening, executive director Howard Fischer said, “the New York Jazz Museum will permanently memorialize and more widely publicize such a contribution. Today, in New
66 Len Kunstadt, “New York Jazz Museum Opens Friday, June 16, 1972,” Record Research no.117, (August 1972): 1. 67Kunstadt, “New York Jazz Museum Opens Friday, June 16, 1972,” 1. 68 Kunstadt, “New York Jazz Museum Opens Friday, June 16, 1972,” 1. 69 Kunstadt, “New York Jazz Museum Opens Friday, June 16, 1972,” 5.
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York City and its environs, live most of the legendary jazz artists who have helped develop this uniquely American art form. The Society had the distinct opportunity to present this heritage to the world with the active cooperation of those who made it possible.”70 The museum mission emphasized American creativity and professional excellence through artistic, cultural and educational exhibits. The museum planned to stress the history of jazz, as well as what was currently happening and any plans for the future.71
Jazz Panorama, the specially produced documentary, outlined jazz history and was produced by Louis M. Gersten. It contained records, tapes, photos, paintings, and sheet music from Jack Bradley. The thirty-minute documentary blended narrative from jazz legends with artifacts to show the development of jazz from its African origins to present. As the museum opened, they did not have the material for a permanent history of jazz exhibit, so they began with a series of temporary exhibits, the first on Louis Armstrong, and the second on the career of
Duke Ellington.72
In 1975, controversy began over the New York Jazz Museum. A rift developed between the Board of Directors and those running the museum. According to Phoebe Jacobs, a member of the board, “there were differences in the reporting of facts between Fischer, Bradley and the board.”73 The rent on the museum building had not been paid for months and the museum was evicted from its original location in a carriage house, although executive director Fischer disagreed. Resignations of board members began after the eviction. As the resignations began the board “fired” Fischer, but he claimed the board could not do that and fired Bradley, his second in command, and changed the locks on the carriage house. Fischer withdrew any remaining funds
70 “New York Jazz Museum Opened,” Jazz Forum (October 1972): 41. 71 “New York Jazz Museum Opened,” 41. 72 “Jazz Museum Premieres ‘Jazz Panorama’,” Jazz Forum no. 21 (February 1923): 20-21. 73 “Jazz Museum at Dusk,” Jazz Forum no. 42 (December 1975): 9.
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from the museum accounts and the Attorney General appointed an interim board. Fischer stated,
“I never wanted absolute control, but the original board gave me the go ahead. When the museum was obviously going to be successful and was about to outgrow its original form, all of a sudden I was given advice.”74 By the end of 1975, the museum was in a temporary location at the Empire Hotel and Fischer was about to sign a lease on a more permanent location. New sets of bylaws were established and the board of trusties was reorganized.75 The museum reopened on June 22, 1976 at West 54th Street off Broadway in a two story building with more room for exhibits, concerts, and archives according to Fischer.76 Exhibits were displayed on the ground floor in the front of the building with a stage in the back. The second floor was undeveloped at the reopening.77
By February 1977, the museum was back to financial instability. In a brief article in
Variety on February 9, 1977 it was announced Howard Fischer, executive director and one of the original founders of the museum was fired by the board of trustees he had reorganized months earlier. According to board president Ann Ruckert, the museum had been having financial trouble since it bought the new building.78 Ruckert said that a Committee to Save the New York
Jazz Museum had been formed and headed by John Hammond. A final concert was planned in hopes of raising funds to keep the museum open.79 The ‘Jamathon’ lasted sixty hours and raised approximately $13,000. It kept the museum open temporarily, but short of the $54,000 needed to keep the museum open for another two months.80 The museum closed permanently in 1978.
74 “Jazz Museum at Dusk,” 9. 75 “Jazz Museum at Dusk,” 9. 76 “Jazz Museum Reopens,” Down Beat no. 43 (9 September 1976): 10. 77 “Jazz Museum Reopens,” 10. 78 “N.Y. Jazz Museum has the Real Blues,” Variety: The International Entertainment Weekly 286 (9 February 1977): 121. 79 “N.Y. Jazz Museum has the Real Blues,” 121. 80 “Jamathon Benefit Saves Jazz Museum from the Sheriff,” Variety: The International Entertainment Weekly 286 (16 February 1977): 59.
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Acting director Ann Ruckert stored the collection because she still had hope that the museum would be able to be reopened in a new location.81 The collection was eventually donated to
Rutgers University in New Jersey.82
Dan Morgenstern, director the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University said the collapse of the museum and loss of its building was unsurprising. Morgenstern said to Jazz magazine, “it was always an uphill struggle, it would have all happened much earlier if it hadn’t been for the marathon. When you have a museum, if you don’t have an endowment, it’s not enough for the public to come in and pay $10 or $20 [apiece].”83 The financial issues at the New
York Jazz Museum were not unique specifically to popular culture museums but being a popular culture museum may have enhanced the difficulties. Any museum could have difficulties keeping the doors open without an endowment, with just the profits from gift shop sales and contributions of donors. As a popular culture museum, donors would have to be particularly concerned with the subject matter, just as with any other museum. By this time corporations were heavily involved in museum exhibitions and used them as a “public relations instrument.”84
Corporations sponsored exhibits and museums that did the most for the corporation.
81 Jean Schindler, “Last Ditch Efforts Run Out for New York Jazz Museum,” Jazz 2, no.3 (1978): 14. 82 Howard E. Fischer, Jazz Expose: The New York Jazz Museum and the Power Struggle That Destroyed It (Nashville, TN: Sundog Ltd., 2004): 126. 83 Schindler, “Last Ditch Efforts Run Out for New York Jazz Museum,” 14. 84 Mark Rectanus, Cultural Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 26.
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Figure 4 The exterior of the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi. In 1979 the Carnegie Public Library Board of Trustees in Clarksdale, Mississippi opened the Delta Blues Museum to preserve, interpret, and encourage a deep interest and sense of cultural pride in the story of the blues during the post-Civil Rights era (figure 4). As an educational institution, the museum sought to encourage an interest in the story of the blues, including those who shaped and played it; established an understanding the relationship between blues and other forms of American music; provided educational programs, performances, and exhibits; and created an environment where ideas were shared objectively with respect for diverse audiences.85 When Sid Graves, a blues enthusiast, became director of the Carnegie Public
Library one of his main goals was to establish a local blues museum. He said, “it seemed like an opportunity to increase the local appreciation of the contributions that the African Americans
85 “about;” available from http://www.deltabluesmuseum.org/high/about-strategic.asp; Internet; accessed 25 January 2010; K. Kirby, “Blues Museum Opens in Clarksdale,” Billboard 92 (14 June 1980): 14.
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from here – from the poorest part of America – made to its richest and most original music.”86
Graves thought it seemed natural to have an educational, cultural, recreational museum in a public library, a place that served the public, and that the museum would help increase tourism in an economically depressed area, as well as honor the blues heritage and blues artists.87 In 1990,
Graves stressed, “we don’t want to just preserve the blues; we want to play it. It’s to show the general public and music fans the significance of the blues, and help people enjoy it, and also show the relationship of rock and jazz and gospel and country – the whole history of American music – and how blues relates to that.”88 In the efforts of the museum to play the blues as well as preserve it, the Delta Blues Museum became part of popular culture and the narrative. The museum collected, preserved, and made information, programs, and related services about the history and significance of the blues accessible to the public.89
In 1990, the museum had a circulating collection of 90,000 volumes in the main library, albums that visitors could listen to in the museum, as well as photographs, instruments, and artwork that represented the blues and blues artists.90 The museum also started raising money to renovate the museum building, including an auditorium for performances, build on the exhibits, and grow the collection.91 The Delta Blues Museum was awarded a $250,000 grant from the
National Endowment of the Humanities if they matched it with $750,000: the Hard Rock Café in
Orlando, Florida donated $100,000, and Benson & Hedges, a British cigarette brand, donated
$50,000.92 The large donations by the Hard Rock Café and Benson & Hedges helped to boost
86 Dan Forte, “Mississippi Sojourn: A pilgrimage to the heart of the Delta Reveals that not all has changed since the days of Son House and Tommy Johnson,” Guitar Player 24, no.4 (April 1990): 51. 87 Forte, “Mississippi Sojourn,” 51. 88 Forte, “Mississippi Sojourn,” 52. 89 Jim Bessman, “Ever-Growing Delta Blues Museum Keeps Music’s History Alive,” Billboard 105 (4 December 1993): 16. 90 Forte, “Mississippi Sojourn,” 52. 91 Forte, “Mississippi Sojourn,” 52. 92 Bessman, “Ever-Growing Delta Blues Museum Keeps Music’s History Alive,” 16.
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tourism by donors brining attention to the donations and the museum used the funds to bring attention to the museum.
Graves credits ZZ Top with putting the museum on the map in the spring of 1988, nine years after the museum opened. Graves said, “our visitors have increased substantially – people from every state in the union and around the world.”93 The band commissioned a six-string guitar from Pyramid Guitars of Memphis made of the wood harvested from the house Muddy Waters grew up in just west of Clarksdale and kicked off their Muddywood World Tour at the museum with a press conference on the front steps.94 Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top said in 2000 that the band was “inspired to pay their respects to the blues after visiting the Delta Blues Museum.”95 The band went to the opening of the early blues exhibits with the 78rpm phonograph records,
Gibbons said, “they had stuff all the way back to the early field recordings. It really reminded you of where it all came from.”96
The Delta Blues Museum planned their move from their original location in the local library with 2,200 square feet to a larger location in the town’s freight depot with four thousand square feet in early 1998.97 The train depot was the site of the annual outdoor Sunflower River
Blues and Gospel Festival.98 The museum was completely redesigned for the new space. The individual exhibits were transformed to showcase a single exhibit tracing the path of the blues.99
The museum in the new location, “recreate scenes such as early 20th-century sharecroppers’ cotton fields and street-corner jam sessions.”100 It also included auditory and interactive elements
93 Forte, “Mississippi Sojourn,” 51. 94 Forte, “Mississippi Sojourn,” 51. 95 Patrick Donovan, “Three Guys, Three Chords,” The Age (Melbourne), 21 April 2000. 96 The Age (Melbourne), 21 April 2000. 97 “Delta Blues Museum to Offer Musical Journey,” Blues Review no. 37 (May 1998): 82; Steve Cheseborough, “Delta Blues Museum Expands; Ruskey Resigns,” Living Blues (May/June 1998): 11. 98 Cheseborough, “Delta Blues Museum Expands; Ruskey Resigns,” 11. 99 “Delta Blues Museum to Offer Musical Journey,” 82. 100 “Delta Blues Museum to Offer Musical Journey,” 82.
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that allowed visitors to choose their own paths. Similar to that of blues musicians, according to museum curator John Ruskey, “the visitor is going to be offered a choice that a lot of a musicians had to make: Are they going to stay in the blues or are they going to go to church?”101 The move of the museum was financed through a $1.2 million loan from the state of Mississippi and private donations, according to museum director Ron Gorsegner, who was hired after Sid Graves retired in 1995.102 The museum made the move to the train depot in 1999 during a brief period of instability when many directors were hired and let go by the board. Current executive director
Shelley Ritter was hired in 2003 and approximately 23,000 people visited the museum that year.103
Similar to other reliquary museums, the Museum of Broadcasting became the ultimate shrine of radio and television shows, like the Delta Blues Museum did for the blues. The
Museum of Broadcasting opened in November 1976, in New York City. The museum was founded to “assure that the audio and video heritage of everything from advertising to soap operas not fall into oblivion.”104 The museum set a five year goal to collect 20,000 broadcasts that represented “commercial broadcasting by period, genre, and network, including programs that earned high ratings, awards, and critical – but not necessarily popular-acclaim.”105 A year after the museum opened the radio collection included the earliest of “Amos ‘n Andy,” a variety of comedy and musical variety shows from the 1930s and 1940s, and the coverage of
Lindbergh’s return in 1927. The television collection concentrated on some of the earliest broadcasts including congressional hearings, the Kefauver crime hearing of 1951, Joe
101 “Delta Blues Museum to Offer Musical Journey,” 82. 102 “Delta Blues Museum Expands; Ruskey Resigns,” 11. 103 “About the Delta Blues Museum, Clarksdale MS;” available from http://www.deltabluesmuseum.org/high/about.asp; Internet; accessed 27 January 2010; Stephen A. King, “Memory, Mythmaking, and Museums: Constructive Authenticity and the Primitive Blues Subject,” Southern Communication Journal 71, no. 3 (September 2006): 238. 104 Deirdre Boyle, “Preserving Broadcast History,” American Libraries 8, no. 9 (October 1977): 515. 105 Boyle, “Preserving Broadcast History,” 515.
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McCarthy’s self-defense on Edward Murrow’s “See It Now,” and the comedy routines of Lucille
Ball.106 In Mythmakers of the American Dream: The Nostalgic Vision in Popular Culture by
Wiley Lee Umphlett, he claimed, “the flexibility and adaptability of the television medium have made of it our most reliable means for reexperiencing many of our most nostalgic moments of identification with popular forms of expression.”107 The Museum of Broadcasting allowed visitors to relive radio and television programs indefinitely. The past programs were representative of the time they were created and could educate visitors about the popular experience as in the case of “All in the Family.” The actions of Archie Bunker were controlled by what happened around him in a culture that had grown increasingly tolerant toward large differences in social behavior.108
CBS chairman William S. Paley founded the Museum of Broadcasting; he was also the chief financial backer. At the opening of the museum, Paley spoke of the mission of the Museum of Broadcasting, “the precious body of broadcasting history that is still in existence – discs, kinescope film, and audio and videotape – must be preserved. Otherwise, it will simply, by neglect, disintegrate or disappear.”109 Ten years prior to the museum opening, the William S.
Paley Foundation began field studies to determine what others had saved of broadcast materials and where they were. Studies concluded that while some material had been lost, a great deal still existed in universities, private collections, and at networks. In the beginning the museum signed agreements with CBS and NBC and was in negotiations with ABC, PBS, and National Public
106 Boyle, “Preserving Broadcast History,” 515; Douglas F. Gibbons, “News and Notices: The Museum of Broadcasting, New York,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 1, no. 1 (1981): 67. 107 Wiley Lee Umphlett, Mythmakers of the American Dream: The Nostalgic Vision in Popular Culture, (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1983), 162. 108 Umphlett, Mythmakers of the American Dream, 162. 109 Boyle, “Preserving Broadcast History,” 515.
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Radio for access to program archives. The museum hoped to “preserve the raw material for future historians and provide resources for the present.”110
Mary V. Ahern, curator of the Museum of Broadcasting, published a short article that outlined the five-year goals of the museum on its first anniversary. Within that time the museum wanted to collect, preserve, process, and catalog nine thousand hours of broadcasting in the
United States from the 1920s through the 1970s. It was broken down into 5,500 hours of radio and 3,500 hours of television that represented the diversity of programs available. The categories selected for coverage were top rated nighttime and daytime programming; milestone specials that included premieres, debuts, and anniversaries; awards and nominations, including Peabody,
Emmy’s, and Clio’s; performing arts; informational and biographical programming that included public affairs and documentaries; children’s programming; sports; and full days of programming both historical and random.111
Visitors to the museum were able to select a program from the card catalog and play it back on one of eight consoles in the Broadcast Study Center. Reservations were possible for the consoles and each console accommodated three people. By 1981, Ahern expected as many as five hundred thousand cards in the catalog for the nine thousand hours.112
In 1979, journalist Peter Sourian met with museum president Robert Saudek and curator
Mary Ahern. Sourian called Saudek a ‘walking capsule of broadcasting history.’ According to
Sourian, Robert Saudek was nine years old when radio began in 1920 and a second-generation broadcaster. His father worked for KDKA in Pittsburgh. Prior to his position at the Museum of
Broadcasting, Saudek set up RCA Corporation’s Blue Network in the late 1930s, became the vice president in charge of public affairs at ABC, produced the Omnibus series, and taught
110 Boyle, “Preserving Broadcast History,” 515. 111 Mary V. Ahern, “The Museum of Broadcasting,” Bulletin 9, no. 2-3 (1977): 11-12. 112 Ahern, “The Museum of Broadcasting,” 14-15.
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practical and theoretical courses in broadcasting at Harvard. When he visited the museum,
Saudek observed actors doing research on past performances, met a young couple interested in television and a student watching the McCarthy hearings for a paper on McCarthy.113
In 1986, the museum announced plans to move into a new seventeen story, forty million dollar building designed by Phillip Johnson and funded by William Paley with hopes for four times the space that the Museum of Broadcasting had in their original location. At the announcement, Paley stated, “This growth far exceeds our fondest hopes when the museum first opened its doors on November 9, 1976. The Museum of Broadcasting is the only place in the world where the public is welcome to hear and see historic radio and television programs.”114
The museum used approximately thirty-eight thousand square feet and the rest of the space was rented out as commercial offices. The Museum of Broadcasting owned the building and land, and the rental income was set to fund the museum’s operating expenses. To complete the project
ABC, CBS, and NBC all pledged two and a half million dollars over five years to complete the project with the museum’s trustees leading a campaign that raised the rest of the funding.
President of the museum, Robert Batscha said, “the new museum should enable us to give better service to the public.”115 Batscha also stated that the number of viewing consoles would increase from twenty-three to one hundred and two theaters. One theater that sat two hundred people and one that sat seventy-five.116
On October 26, 1990, William Paley died at age 89, just months before the opening of the new Museum of Broadcasting that he had funded so that “future generations could more
113 Peter Sourian, “Television,” Nation 228, no. 8 (3 March 1979): 254. 114 Thomas Morgan, “New Building for Broadcast Museum,” New York Times (New York City), 3 December 1986. 115 New York Times (New York City), 3 December 1986. 116 New York Times (New York City), 3 December 1986.
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effectively partake of radio and TV’s 20th century heritage.”117 In 1991, when the museum opened in its new seventeen story building it had two theaters, two screening rooms, a group listening room, ninety-six individual booths, and a research library with twenty-five thousand television programs, fifteen thousand radio programs, and ten thousand commercials in its collection.118 That same year the board of trustees changed the name of the museum to the
Museum of Television and Radio.119 On the 20th anniversary of the museum’s opening the Los
Angeles branch was opened on March 18, 1996. The LA location housed the same collection of television and radio programming in an effort to make the resources available to the public and creative communities in both cities.120
The museum’s board of trustees changed the museum name one more time in 2007. The board felt that “in the Internet and cell phone era, that name [Museum of Television and Radio] seems out of date as well, so the museum is renaming itself again, this time as the Paley Center for Media, after the late CBS founder William S. Paley.”121 In an effort to overhaul the museum and make it more exciting and accessible the center downplayed its programming archive and
“recasting itself as a place for industry leaders and the public to discuss the creation of those shows and the role of media in society.”122 The center doubled the number of panels and interview sessions and online media executives were increasingly invited to take part of the discussions.123
117 “Bill Paley: 1901-1990,” New York Times, 5 November 1990. 118 “Museum of Television and Radio,” American History Illustrated 26, no. 6 (January/February 1992): 8. 119 “History/The Paley Center for Media,” available from http://www.paleycenter.org/about-mission-history- history/; Internet; accessed 5 March 2012. 120 “History/The Paley Center for Media;” Internet; accessed 5 March 2012. 121 Elizabeth Jensen, “New Name and Mission for Museum of Television,” New York Times (New York City), 5 June 2007. 122 New York Times (New York City), 5 June 2007. 123 New York Times (New York City), 5 June 2007.
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Figure 5 From the Art of Caroline exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, California. The exhibit consisted of drawings, maquettes, armatures and full puppets from the making of the movie Caroline. The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, California was a different type of popular culture museum (figure 5). The museum focused primarily on art rather than the history of a popular culture phenomenon. It began as a ‘museum without walls’ in 1984 that placed emphasis on preserving, documenting, and exhibiting a unique and accessible art form. The museum used cartoon art to convey cultural diversity in the community and the importance of self-expression with the use of traveling exhibitions, lectures, and outreach programs.124 After the museum first began, organizers used artwork from their own collections to develop the exhibitions in local museums and corporate spaces. In 1987, through an endowment from Peanuts creator Charles
124 Cartoon Art Museum, “Cartoon Art Museum / About Us;” available from http://cartoonart.org/about-us/; Internet; accessed 25 January 2010.
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M. Schulz, the museum moved into San Francisco’s art center, Yerba Buena Gardens.125 And in
1995, the museum reopened again on April 26th, in a larger space after a year of architectural planning and construction. The new gallery consisted of six thousand square feet and included a children's gallery. The first exhibits showcased recent acquisitions, political cartoons about foreign policy, and caricatures by Zach Trenholm of the San Francisco Examiner and Jim
Hummel of the San Jose Mercury News.126
The new facility also held the eleven thousand-item collection, which had items from the
1730s to present, including comic books, animate movies, magazines, advertisements, newspapers, sculpture, video productions, and a three thousand-volume library.127 The museums mission did not just include showcasing "super men and women, bats and robins, and might mice in tights." According to museum director Rod Gilchrist, "animation is an art form that is getting growing attention not only from mainstream movies and books, but on a serious academic and international scale as well. Consider a cartoonist like Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on 'Maus,' or New Yorker magazine artist, who won a MacArthur Foundation
'genius' grant in 2000 for his social cartoon work. It's art. And their work is here in our museum."128
Malcolm Whyte opened the original museum because of his fascination with comics.
Whyte said that he never realized how much was learned by looking at comics and cartoon art originally, but now understood that "history, architecture, social prejudices -- which goes to show that cartoons and animation are just like any other art form we can and do learn from."129
125 “Cartoon Art Museum / About Us;” Internet; accessed 25 January 2010. 126 “Museum Moving to Bigger S.F. Space,” Editor & Publisher 127, no. 50 (10 December 1994), 36; “D.C. is the Site for a Cartoon Museum,” Editor & Publisher 128, no. 15 (15 April 1995), 38. 127 “Cartoon Art Museum,” American History 30, no. 4 (September/October 1995), 9. 128 Delfin Vigil, “Toon Town,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, CA), 9 January 2005. 129 San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, CA), 9 January 2005.
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Wiley Lee Umphlett, in Mythmakers of the American Dream, stated that as the comic strip evolved it incorporated storytelling methods started in popular fiction. For anyone who wanted to understand feelings of a time in the last century, Umphlett wrote, “the comics, with their diurnal recording of the whims, foibles, fads, and vicissitudes of everyday living, exist as one of our richest sources for research.”130
Figure 6 The entrance to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. In June 1986, Cleveland, Ohio, was chosen by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Foundation as the future site for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (figure 6).
Cleveland was the city where DJ Alan Freed coined the term ‘rock and roll’ and the strength of the local lobbying effort beat Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco for the museum. The museum was expected to thrust twenty-five million dollars into the local economy every year.
The community’s campaign was led by the mayor’s office, pop radio stations and the Greater
130 Umphlett, Mythmakers of the American Dream, 73-74.
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Cleveland Growth Association. The result was 660,000 signatures on a petition that supported the rock museum in Cleveland.131
While the location in Cleveland had not been set, the building was expected to cost twenty million dollars to build. Ohio Governor Richard Celeste pledged four million for the construction, and the remainder of the funds was expected from the federal government and private corporations. There were plans for the hall to include a library, archives, museum and a
1,500-seat auditorium for programs.132
In 1988, two years after Cleveland was chosen as the museum site, fundraising to build the museum had not gone well; only $650,000 had been raised locally. Celeste and Cleveland
Mayor George Voinovich called on prominent local contacts, and fifteen million dollars in pledges and gifts was raised in just seven months.133 By October 1989, funding was still not completed and the beginning of building waited on a seven million dollar grant from the Urban
Development Action Grant.134 The project was on its way to existing “to educate visitors, fans and scholars from around the world about the history and continuing significance of rock and roll music.”135 The museum collected, preserved, exhibit, and interpreted rock and roll through its library and archives, as well as its education programs.
The museum opened Labor Day weekend in 1995. The triangular glass and steel building was designed by I.M. Pei and grew to cost $94 million to open.136 The museum expected to bring in one million visitors annually and opened the museum with an HBO-televised rock concert that featured Bruce Springsteen and Melissa Etheridge, a parade, and a ribbon cutting ceremony with
131 Lisa Tabor, “Cleveland Chosen as Home for Rock’s Hall of Fame,” International Musician 84 (June 1986): 1. 132 “Cleveland Chosen as Home for Rock’s Hall of Fame,” 17. 133 Gretchen Morgenson, “The CEOs of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Forbes 142, no. 13 (26 December 1988): 15. 134 Stephen Phillips, “Cleveland May Finally Get Some Satisfaction,” Business Week (2 October 1989): 60. 135 The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Inc., “Support the Museum; available from http://www.rockhall.com/support; Internet; accessed 25 January 2010. 136 Benjamin Forgey, “Just One Look is all it Took; The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an Instant Hit for I.M. Pei,” The Washington Post (Washington, DC), 27 August 1995.
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approximately fifty thousand people.137 The 150,000 square foot museum on the shores of Lake
Erie offered thousands of memorabilia objects in the form of classic guitars, stage outfits, notebooks of lyrics, studio equipment from Sam Phillips and Phil Spector, album covers, contemporary posters, records, and CDs.138 The majority of the museum’s collection was displayed in the in the thirty thousand square foot main exhibit ‘Roll Over, Beethoven’ in mainly chronological order if visitors followed the flow intended by exhibit designers. The exhibit ‘The
Beat Goes On’ had interactive listening stations focusing on sixty different artists, ‘Come See
About Me’ was an interactive encyclopedia with five hundred entries, and ‘Rock and Roll
Music’ was a list of five hundred songs that shaped rock and roll that could be looked up by artist, song title, or decade. The Hall of Fame was located in a “darkened chamber with glass walls, etched signatures and video screens.”139 There was room for all 120 inductees at the time, the black glass walls reflected the images and reinforced the thread of interconnectedness that was a theme in the museum.140
The exhibits placed rock in a social and historical context that emphasized the roots of rock in country, blues, gospel, and folk, and branches in rap and grunge. The mission of the museum was to honor “those who created, built, defined and popularized rock and roll.”141 The museum used lights and sounds, film and video to create deeper and more accurate environment.142
137 Raju Narisetti, “Marketing: Some Rock Museum Tie-ins Seem Off-key,” The Wall Street Journal (New York City), 1 September 1995; Ken Ringle, “The Days When Rock Began to Roll,” The Washington Post (Washington, DC), 2 September 1995. 138 The Washington Post (Washington, DC), 2 September 1995. 139 Richard Harrington, “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On; Inside the Hall of Fame, Cleveland has a Chunk of Rock History, and It’s a Gem,” The Washington Post (Washington, DC), 4 September 1995. 140 The Washington Post (Washington, DC), 4 September 1995. 141 The Washington Post (Washington, DC), 2 September 1995. 142 The Washington Post (Washington, DC), 4 September 1995.
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Early popular culture museums covered the broad span of popular culture. They all served as shrines to their subject while still being focused on preserving and interpreting their medium. These museums grew out of a shared concern that the history of the featured subject was in danger of being lost without an organized effort to gather and preserve it. The founding of the museums served as a way of confirming the importance of the subjects and their historical significance. Carla Freccero explained “indeed, the domain of the popular is so vast that no one could hope to cover its range of cultural productions.”143 A significant year for popular culture and museum professionalization was 1967. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum opened and Ray B. Browne established the Journal of Popular Culture and the Popular Culture
Library at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. Ten years earlier, in 1957,
Freeman Tilden published Interpreting Our Heritage. It was the first book to discuss the philosophy behind interpretation with the goal of making successful instructors out of the museum curators and park superintendents the book was aimed at. Tilden emphasized the difference between classroom education where there was a captive audience and “elective education” where there was not. According to Tilden, interpretation was “an educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by first- hand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply communicate factual information.”144 Tilden developed six principles that were essential to interpretation. The best interpretation was only the beginning and created a continuing interest. As Tilden explained his six principles, Browne provided the most concrete definition for popular culture, a category that the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum certainly fell into. Popular culture was “the
143 Freccero, Popular Culture, 12. 144 Tilden, Interpreting, 33.
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everyday world around us: the mass media, entertainments, and diversions.”145 While there was no specific reference to Tilden and Browne, the Country Hall of Fame and Museum, it used the standards Tilden and Browne set forth. The museum used objects and media to interpret relationships and events in country music’s past. The museumification of popular culture helped validate the academic study of popular culture, while popular culture research provided the basis of interpretation.
Each of the museums put particular importance on the preservation, documentation, and exhibition of their subjects and did more than just entertain. Which was no different than any other museum, but they also served as shrines to their topics. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, New York Jazz Museum, Delta Blues Museum, and the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame and Museum did more than just honor famous musicians. They also celebrated those that worked behind the scenes of the performers, explained the history of different instruments, showed costumes to explain how they could enhance a performance, and served as a library for researchers investigating how people lived in the past. Each museum also hoped to increase tourism to the cities they were founded in.
The Cartoon Art Museum, New York Jazz Museum and the Museum of Broadcasting all hoped to engage their community in the topics the museums were focused on. And the Buffalo
Bill Museum and Grave, Delta Blues Museum, and Cartoon Art Museum all started as small object and information based museums without interpretation that developed into museums that gained distinction. With distinction the museums were able to expand and professionalize further. Whereas the Museum of Broadcasting, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum were organized and all started with larger budgets that allowed for earlier professionalization.
145 2002 Americana, “Conversation with Professor Ray B. Browne;” Internet; accessed 25 January 2010.
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The Civil Rights Movement focused on legal inclusion for the under-represented and the post-Civil Rights era was about achieving cultural inclusion. Part of the focus was in the changes in interpretations at museums. It was less about the legal access and more about cultural pride.
Both the New York Jazz Museum and Delta Blues Museum popular culture museums opened during the post-Civil Rights era and emphasized the achievements of primarily African
American musicians and how they helped promote their own cultural pride.
The New York Jazz Museum and the Delta Blues Museum were both post-Civil Rights era developments from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In Race, Pride and the American Identity by Joseph Tilden Rhea described the rise of multiculturalism in the United States. Rhea looked at controversies at museums and historic sites. In the post-Civil Rights era, African American,
American Indian, Latino, and Asian American activists challenged museums and other cultural institutions to expand their representations of minority legacy. Rhea cited American Indian protests and their use of militant tactics, including defacing a mass grave of white soldiers. The
American Indian Movement argued that General George Custer was a brutal killer of American
Indians rather than a crusader of for Western advancement. And in 1991, the United States government renamed Custer Battlefield, the site of Custer’s last stand, Little Bighorn Battlefield.
The site transitioned and highlighted American Indian language, artifacts, and perspectives.
According to Rhea, the American Indian Movement achieved “as complete a victory” as Sitting
Bull over Custer. Rhea noted that, “the victors of the Battle of Little Bighorn had at last won the power to write its own history.”146
The one theme all of the museums in this chapter had in common was fun. Popular culture was about pleasure. All of the museums were also started by aficionados of each
146 Joseph Tilden Rhea, Race Pride and the American Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 33.
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particular type of popular culture the museums focused on. They were reliquary museums that focused on a singular popular culture topic and displayed objects and information with interpretation. The Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave took visitors back to the Wild West, the New
York Jazz Museum put on regular jazz concerts, and the Museum of Broadcasting allowed visitors to re-watch or re-listen to old broadcasts. The Delta Blues Museums, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Cartoon Art Museum, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum all transformed into telling stories through their exhibits. The successful reliquary museums responded to the market based needs of popular culture. Raymond Betts wrote in A History of
Popular Culture: More for Everything, Faster and Brighter that what set popular culture apart was that it was a mass-produced means of pleasure and did not include folk-like activities on the sidelines.147 The Buffalo Bill Museum filled their exhibits with memorabilia from his shows, the
Museum of Broadcasting made every piece of media it had available for visitors, the New York
Jazz Museum provided live jazz shows on the weekends, as did the Delta Blues museum with blues music. By meeting the market-based need that Betts outlined, the museums also brought the study of popular culture away from just reading texts that Dominic Strinati emphasized throughout An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture.
147 Betts, A History of Popular Culture, 1.
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CHAPTER 3 VARIETY: POPULAR CULTURE MUSEUMS FROM HERE TO THERE
As the popular culture field developed and museums professionalized, smaller, more focused popular culture museums began to appear. These museums were small in size and their topics had a limited focus, but their numbers increased steadily. According to Raymond Betts in
A History of Popular Culture: More of Everything, Faster and Brighter “contemporary popular culture is almost without definition, so all-embracing are its subjects, so far are its effects.”148
The museums covered fast food, celebrities, comics, and religion. A broad range was selected for this chapter (figure 7) because they represented smaller popular culture museums that lacked the funding and exposure of larger popular culture museums. Even though these popular culture museums covered a broad range of topics they were worth study as a particular type of museum because they were unique. These museums provided entertainment and education, making them similar to history museums, art museums, and science centers but these museums are also playful and solely devoted to different aspects of popular culture that were not often included in other museums.
148 Betts, A History of Popular Culture, 1.
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Figure 7 Locations of case studies. The popular culture museums featured in this chapter were: (1) the McDonald’s Museum, a recreation of the first restaurant that opened; (2) New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum, for those who wanted to learn about voodoo and the practice of rituals and consultations; (3) the
Fairmount Museum that highlighted famous citizens from Fairmount, Indiana; (4) Ava Gardner
Museum, devoted to preserving the story of Ava Gardner’s life for future generations; (5) the
Houdini Historical Society, organized to bring more tourists to Appleton, Wisconsin; (6)
Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, concentrated on the artistic, cultural and historical impact of comic and cartoon art; (7) the Spam Museum, a playful museum devoted to Spam and its memorabilia; (8) Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, represented of many forms of popular culture in Baltimore, Maryland; and (9) Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, dedicated to preserving Peanuts and telling the story of Schulz's life. These museums were considered smaller because they have a more limited concentration of an aspect of popular culture. Some they were also located in smaller towns. Although each museum appeared to be different they still represented an aspect of popular culture: food, entertainment, celebrities, entertainers, and comics.
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Figure 8 The McDonald’s Museum recreation in Des Plaines, Illinois. The McDonald’s Museum opened in May 21, 1985, as a re-creation set in 1955 (figure
8).149 McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc based it on the first restaurant that opened in Des Plaines,
Illinois, on April 15, 1955. The original restaurant was torn down in 1984 after going through several renovations but the original “Speedee” road sign was kept. The museum was re-built with the original blueprints with minimal modifications to accommodate visitors and staff and
Kroc was personally involved with the museum from working out the details to hosing down the parking lot.150
The museum was red and white tiled and the food preparation and customer service areas were stocked with original equipment. The museum re-created a time when potatoes were peeled fresh, then sliced, blanched, and fried; milkshake mix and syrup were made with Multi-mixers;
149 “McDonald’s Converts Drive-In To Museum,” New York Times, 23 May 1985. 150 “McDonald’s Converts Drive-In to Museum,” New York Times (New York City), 23 May 1985; “Big Mac Museum Restaurant – About McDonald’s,” available from http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/our_company/mcdonalds_history_timeline/museums/big_mac_museum_rest aurant.html; Internet; accessed 6 October 2011; “McDonald’s #1 Store Museum – About McDonald’s;” available from http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/our_company/museums/first_store_museum.html; Internet; accessed 21 February 2010.
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coke and root beer were drawn from a barrel, and orangeade from the orange bowl. All-male mannequins dressed in the uniform from 1955 represented the staff; dark trousers, white shirts, aprons, and paper hats.151
In the museum parking lot were four gleaming cars. A Super 88 Oldsmobile with a sticker on the window that listed the price at $2979.38, in a Chevy Bel Air sport coupe with a high school varsity sweater and 1955 yearbook; red foam dice hung from the rearview of a Ford
Crown Victoria, and in the backseat of a Chrysler St. Regis was a coonskin cap.152
There was also a Big Mac Museum Restaurant that opened in North Huntington,
Pennsylvania, on August 22, 2007. On opening day there was a band, cheerleaders, speeches and hundreds waiting in line to order the sandwich invented in Uniontown. Jim Delligatti, the inventor of the Big Mac in 1967, cut the ribbon after Ronald McDonald led the crowd in the Big
Mac jingle.153 Museum exhibits included the world’s tallest Big Mac statue; historic memorabilia; flat panel displays with information on McDonald’s, Jim Delligatti, and Ronald
McDonald House Charities; tabletops labeled with pictures and trivia about the Big Mac; and historic graphics on the walls of the restaurant.154
Although the museums functioned as an advertisement for McDonalds, they were created for those interested in the history of the restaurant. It was a small representation of fast food’s past where visitors can see the original McDonalds.
151 Joyce Jurnovoy and David Jenness, America on Display (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1987), 155; “Big Mac Museum Restaurant – About McDonald’s;” Internet; accessed 6 October 2011;“McDonald’s #1 Store Museum – About McDonald’s;” Internet; accessed 21 February 2010. 152 Jurnovoy and Jenness, America on Display, 155. 153 Jennifer Reeger, “McDonald’s Big Mac Museum Opens,” Tribune-Review (Greensburg, PA), 23 August 2007. 154 “Big Mac Museum Restaurant – About McDonald’s;” Internet; accessed 6 October 2011; “McDonald’s #1 Store Museum – About McDonald’s;” Internet; accessed 21 February 2010.
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Figure 9 The New Orleans Voodoo Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. The New Orleans Historic Voodoo was a different type of popular culture museum than the McDonald's museums. It focused on popularized stories told through generations in New
Orleans on tours. Located in the French Quarter, the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum was founded in 1972 by Charles M. Gandolfo, whose family escaped the slave uprisings in Haiti hidden in barrels by a friend who practiced Voodoo and were sent to New Orleans (figure 9). It was a similar story to other families from New Orleans. The museum was open to visitors who wanted to learn about Voodoo but also for rituals and consultations. Voodoo was an ancient religion that travelled from Africa to America on the slave ships.155
The museum placed great emphasis on Marie Laveau, "a free woman, a quadroon, meaning that African, Indian, French, and Spanish blood ran through her veins."156 She was originally a hairdresser and a nurse during the yellow fever epidemic; from these endeavors she
155 Lovric, Cowgirls, Cockroaches, and Celebrity Lingerie, 42; Abigail Tucker, “New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum,” Smithsonian 42, no. 3 (June 2011): 52. 156 Lovric, Cowgirls, Cockroaches, and Celebrity Lingerie, 43.
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learned about everything and everyone in New Orleans. She became all-powerful in the local
Voodoo community. By the 1830s, she had styled herself as the Popess of Voodoo. She attended mass every day and then performed her Voodoo behind St. Louis' Cathedral, with the church's knowledge. With her second husband she practiced very successful fertility rituals. She had fifteen children, including two pairs of twins and one set of triplets.157
Jerry, Charles Gandolfo’s brother, ran the museum and Voodoo priest John T. Martin presided over the spiritual aspects. Jolie Vert, an albino green python, and Hugene, an 18 foot,
300-pound Burmese python assisted Martin. The snakes served as a conduit to God through the serpent spirit, Danballah. Martin offered rituals, consultations, and custom Gris Gris -- bags containing protective charms.158
When visitors first came in the museum an alligator’s head and a broom greeted them.
They passed through the gift shop carrying candles, incense, chicken foot Ju Jus, and Voodoo dolls and went into ‘History Hall’ that tracks the slaves’ arrival into New Orleans, where they were forced to practice Catholicism. The ‘Gris Gris’ room explained child-spirit Exu and different Ju Jus -- articles that drive away evil spirits. On display were the blowfish and zombie whip that were used in the zombification process from Haitian Voodoo, and lastly, in the ‘Altar’ room visitors saw a working altar as well as the whishing stump used by Marie Laveau's daughter.159
According to Martha Ward, a University of New Orleans anthropologist who studied
Voodoo, "the museum is an entry point for people who are curious, who want to see what's behind this stuff."160 In the museum’s efforts to preserve the legacy of New Orleans' Voodoo and
157 Lovric, Cowgirls, Cockroaches, and Celebrity Lingerie, 43. 158 Lovric, Cowgirls, Cockroaches, and Celebrity Lingerie, 43. 159 Lovric, Cowgirls, Cockroaches, and Celebrity Lingerie, 43-44. 160 Tucker, “New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum,” 53.
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culture while educating and entertaining, they developed a cemetery walking tour that was included in the museum admission. It took visitors to the tomb of Marie Laveau and went by
Congo Square, St. Expedite, and provided the chance for visitors to talk to a Voodoo priestess.161
This voodoo museum was considered a popular culture museum rather than a local history or folk culture museum because visitors were typically interested in fun and frivolity the museum emphasized, rather than the history of the religion. The museum was about the entertainment in the stories and participating in popular culture.
Figure 10 The Fairmount Historical Museum relocated to the Historic Patterson House on September 5, 1983.
The Fairmount Historical Museum provided entertainment to visitors with the annual
James Dean Festival.162 The small town of Fairmount in Indiana produced a number of talented individuals including James Dean; Jim Davis, creator of Garfield; television journalist Phil
Jones; and author Mary Ward (figure 10). The residents of the town were proud of the famous residents and organized the Fairmount Historical Museum on February 23, 1975. The museum
161 Tucker, “New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum,” 53. 162 “Fairmount Historical Museum – Home;” available from http://www.jamesdeanartifacts.com; Internet; accessed 10 April 2012.
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opened above the Western Auto Store and moved to the historic Patterson house on September 5,
1983. The museum and its board have sponsored the annual Fairmount “Museum Days” Festival since 1975. The three-day festival recognized the prominent Fairmount citizens with activities such as a James Dean look-alike contest, showed of his movies, and a car show with approximately two thousand cars. The museum also had a James Dean Birthday Celebration,
Remembering James Dean Festival, and the James Dean Run Car Show. The museum even provided free maps to local historical Dean sites.163
The bottom floor of the Fairmount Historical Museum was devoted to James Dean.
Visitors began by looking at drawings from his childhood, including a painting of an orchid
Dean made for a teacher. Visitors then moved on to photos of Dean from high school; learn Dean was a good, but not perfect, student; and that he played on the baseball, basketball, and track teams, as well as had the leads in numerous school plays.164
Dean lived on a farm outside of town with his aunt and uncle when he moved to
Fairmount from California after his mother died. He was nine years old. Dean’s relatives were active with the museum, which allowed it to acquire his first motorcycle, a Czech he bought at a
Fairmount shop; a recorder he used to practice his lines with; letters from a girlfriend; and photos from the sets of East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant. On the second floor, there was a room devoted to Garfield and his creator, Jim Davis.165 This museum should be studied as a popular culture museum because the local historical museum emphasized the celebrities with
163 Christine des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest (Black Earth, WI: Trials Books, 2002), 121-122; “About the Fairmount Historical Museum,” available from http://www.jamesdeanartifacts.com/cart/about.htm; Internet; accessed 21 February 2010. 164 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 121. 165 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 121-122.
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strong local ties. The emphasis on local connections follows a principal set by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen in Presence of the Past by making the history relatable to visitors.166
Figure 11 Costume from Ava Gardner’s film “East Side, West Side” at the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, North Carolina. The Ava Gardner Museum was about a local celebrity in the same manner that the
Fairmount Historical Museum primarily focused on James Dean. The Ava Gardner Museum was home to a large collection of Ava Gardner memorabilia (figure 11). In the early 1980s, Dr.
166 Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past.
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Thomas Banks, a former publicist for Columbia Pictures who collected Ava memorabilia for over fifty years, purchased the home where Ava lived from age two to thirteen. He ran the Ava
Museum during the summer for nine years and died in August 1989. After his death, Banks’ wife donated the collection to the town of Smithfield, North Carolina, Ava’s birthplace and final resting place. His wife was assured that a permanent museum would be maintained.167
The Ava Gardner Museum was incorporated in 1996 to manage and care for the collection and the Ava Gardner Museum Foundation continued to acquire artifacts related to the life of Ava Gardner. Since the museum moved to its current location in downtown Smithfield and opened its 6,400 square foot facility in 2000, it attracted approximately twelve thousand visitors a year.168
Each object in the collection at the museum “was either owned by Ava Gardner or her family, used in her films or had a special meaning or relationship to Ava.”169 The exhibit contained costumes, movie posters and awards that pertained to her career and Ava’s personal items such as china, jewelry, fine art, and clothing. Though there were twenty thousand artifacts in the museum, visitors identified the Frank Sinatra Watch, cape and shoes from The Barefoot
Contessa, and the dress from the film The Great Sinner as their favorites. The Frank Sinatra
Watch was given to Frank Sinatra by Ava. The back of the watch reads, “To Frank and desert nights – Ava,” and was believed to reference Sinatra’s private getaway in Palm Desert,
California. Gardner wrote, “our love was deep and true, even though the fact that we couldn’t
167 Ava Gardner Museum, “Museum History;” available from http://www.avagardner.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70&Itemid=68; Internet; accessed 21 February 2010. 168 “Museum History;” Internet; accessed 21 February 2010. 169 Ava Gardner Museum, “Museum Collection;” available from http://www.avagardner.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=44:the-collections&catid=34:feature- components&Itemid=56; Internet; accessed 21 February 2010.
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live with each other anymore than we couldn’t live without each other sometimes made it hard for outsiders to understand,”170 of her time with Frank Sinatra in her biography.
The cape visitors were interested in was silk satin and embroidered with gold thread and brass sequins. It was worn by Ava for the publicity stills for The Barefoot Contessa but was not in the movie. The dress from The Great Sinner was in the main case of the museum gallery and visitors “often remark on the diminutive size of the dress and exclaim over her waist size – 18 inches.”171 This museum should be studied as a popular culture museum because it was entirely devoted to her film, her life, and her movies. According to Dominic Strinati in An Introduction to
Studying Popular Culture, Hollywood cinema proved to be popular and powerful mass media tools in the production and consumption of popular culture.172
170 Ava Gardner, Ava: My Story (New York City: NY, Bantam Books, 1990), 157. 171 “Museum Collection;” Internet; accessed 21 February 2010. 172 Strinati, An Introduction to Studying, xiv.
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Figure 12 The Metamorphosis illusion at the Houdini Historical Society. The Houdini Historical Society was organized in the 1980s when a group of local supporters wanted to bring more tourism to Appleton, Wisconsin (figure 12). The group "saw
Houdini's association with the town as a source of community pride and wanted to play up the connection more."173 To do this the Society opened an exhibit at the Outgame County Historical
Museum in downtown Appleton on Houdini's life and reign as a master illusionist.174
Harry Houdini was not originally from Appleton but he publicly claimed all his life he was born and raised there. He was "an escape artist, aviator, author, and exposer of spiritualist
173 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 53. 174 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 53.
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frauds."175 He was born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest, Hungary in 1874. When his father was hired by the local Jewish community to be their rabbi, the family relocated to Appleton and helped them build a temple.176
Though David Copperfield had a large collection of Houdini artifacts, it was believed that
Houdini's brother, Hardeen, had the largest collection of memorabilia, which was given to
Sidney Radner, a friend. Radner decided to exhibit his collection in Appleton because it was the hometown Houdini claimed. The collection was leased to the museum in 1988, not all of which was displayed because of its delicate nature, such as Houdini's scrapbooks.177
On view in the original exhibit, ‘Houdini!,’ visitors found the contraptions from which
Houdini broke free: handcuffs, ropes, trunks, straightjackets, a milk can, and part of a prison cell.
There were also posters, newspaper articles, and advertisements for Houdini's shows; photographs from his childhood; a video with clips from Houdini's silent film in which he flew a biplane; and the only known recording of his voice, on an Edison wax cylinder from 1914 introduced his water-torture-cell act. The exhibit ran from 1989 to 2002.178
The new exhibit, ‘A.K.A. Houdini,’ was seventeen thousand square feet and on display on the second floor of the museum. It was more autobiographical and featured the major periods of Houdini's life; early years in Wisconsin, his transformation from struggling magician to superstar, and his efforts to expose spiritualists. The exhibit also revealed how Houdini's famous
"Metamorphosis" illusion was done. The decision to explain the trick caused controversy with other magicians and Sidney Radner decided to pull his collection from the museum. Radner said,
"I don't want my name involved in a museum that's exposing any magic. That's not what Houdini
175 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 53. 176 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 53. 177 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 53. 178 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 54; “Unveiling Houdini Magic Trick Causes Museum Controversy,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), 14 April 2004.
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wanted."179 The text Houdini! The Career of Ehrich Weiss by Kenneth Silverman outlined the many forms “Metamorphosis” took in order to keep the illusion fresh for viewers. The illusion depended upon speed, agility, and teamwork.180
Visitors learned that Houdini's family relocated to Milwaukee a few years after moving to
Appleton and he began his career as a trapeze artist in a carnival in 1882. There was also a walking tour put together by the historical center for visitors that takes them to Houdini's childhood home, the Fox River where he said he nearly drowned and the drugstore where Edna
Ferber interviewed him. Annual events for the center included summer magic shows and
Halloween with Houdini. Researchers from Discovery Channel, A&E, BBC, Wisconsin Public
Television, and the Learning Channel all used the artifacts and archives.181 Researchers often use museums to research topics they reported on. When researchers were interested in an aspect of popular culture and go to a popular culture museum for research, the museum becomes part of popular culture when the researcher references where their information came from.
179 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), 14 April 2004. 180 Kenneth Silverman, Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss: American Self-Liberator, Europe’s Eclipsing Sensation, World’s Handcuff King & Prison Breaker – Nothing on Earth Can Hold Houdini Prisoner!!!, (New York City, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996), 13. 181 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 54; The History Museum at the Castle, “Houdini;” available from http://www.foxvalleyhistory.org/houdini; Internet; accessed 6 October 2011; Robert R. King, “Houdini/Harry Houdini/Houdini Historical Center;” available from http://www.houdinitribute.com/houdinihistorical.html; Internet; accessed 6 October 2011.
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Figure 13 Poster for the 2010 Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival in New York City. The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in New York City began in October
2001 as a museum with no physical location, similar to the Cartoon Art Museum in San
Francisco, California (figure 13). The mission of the museum was to “promote the understanding and appreciation of comic and cartoon art as well as to detail and discuss the artistic, cultural, and historical impact of what is the world's most popular art form.”182 MoCCA contended that comics and cartoons were influential in effecting discussion on issues such as society, culture, philosophy, and politics. This museum should be studied as a popular culture museum rather
182 Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, “MoCCA – Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art;” available from http://moccany.org/about.html; Internet; accessed 25 January 2010.
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than an art museum because it focused solely on comics and cartoon art, a significant form of popular culture. Illustrators and authors often used comics and cartoon art to critique society.
The museum argued that history showed comics and cartoons “to be instrumental in documenting – and interpreting – historic events and social change.”183 In its effort to promote understanding and appreciation, MoCCA also aimed to collect, preserve, study, educate, and display comic and cartoon art, which included animation, anime, cartoons, comic books, comic strips, gag cartoons, humorous illustration, illustration, political illustration, editorial cartoons, caricature, graphic novels, sports cartoons, and computer generated art. In its effort it collected, preserved, and promoted understanding and appreciation, and MoCCA tried to answer questions about comics and cartoons including: what does the art tell us about the time period that it was created in?; were there any First Amendment issues regarding content that came into play?; how does censorship influence what was and was not published?184
The first summer after the museum began, it held the first Museum of Comic and Cartoon
Art Festival. By the second summer it attracted more than “6,000 artists, editors, publishers, rights folk and assorted media professionals for a weekend of comics, panels, retailing and assorted events”185 and “2,000 paying visitors into Manhattan’s Puck Building.”186 MoCCA ran their festival differently than most comic conventions; there were no mainstream publishers and no other merchandise available.187
In addition to their ever-growing annual festival, MoCCA also developed original exhibits. From 2006 to 2007, ‘Saturday Morning: Art & Artifacts From the Golden Age of
Television’ was on display. The topic was something most people could relate to, according to
183 “MoCCA – Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art;” Internet; accessed 25 January 2010. 184 “MoCCA – Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art;” Internet; accessed 25 January 2010. 185 Calvin Reid, “MoCCA Fest, San Diego Comic-Con Next,” Publishers Weekly 250, no. 24 (16 June 2003). 186 Douglas Wolk, “Jam-Packed MoCCA Fest,” Publishers Weekly 250, no. 27 (7 July 2003). 187 Wolk, “Jam-Packed MoCCA Fest,” 7 July 2003.
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Matt Murray, curator and chief operating officer at MoCCA. The exhibit consisted of regular screenings, lectures, and a gallery of original art and memorabilia. The exhibit focused on the time between 1966 and 1990, referred to as the “Golden Age” of Saturday morning cartoons.
Prior to 1990, there were three networks that aired original content on Saturday morning. Murray said there were more options for children today; there were 24-hour cable cartoon channels now.188
Figure 14 The Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota. The Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota opened in fall 2001 in a former shopping center next to the Hormel Foods offices (figure 14). It originally opened in a small space at a local mall but it "exploded into an expansive, playful museum."189 The museum was 16,500 square feet of
188 Friedman, “A Blast from the TV’s Past,” 37. 189 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 74.
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Spam, from cans, to memorabilia, recipes, and t-shirts. Visitor Brian White from New York City said, "when I heard of the Spam Museum I was so excited to come. It's definitely living up to the dream."190
When visitors first entered into the museum there was a wall of 3,500 Spam cans, enough to feed a healthy adult for about ten years. Moving farther into the museum visitors could take a seat at the 1950s-style diner that had computers with Spam activities while they waited for the film, "Spam -- A Love Story" to start. The film was not an educational history of Spam, but rather clips of fans dressed up in Spam outfits at the annual festival sharing stories about the first time they ate spam.191
This was a popular culture museum, as well as an advertisement for Spam. The museum emphasized Spam’s place in popular culture. When highlighting Spam’s history the museum included fans dressed up in Spam costumes and how famous chefs used Spam. The first exhibit explained the ingredients in spam: ham, pork, sugar, and sodium nitrate (a preservative).
Introduced in 1937, Spam stood for spiced ham and was an "American icon of sorts," according to museum manager Shawn Radford. There was a replica of an early butcher shop and the wall exhibits explained to visitors the Hormel family's background and recounted how the company began. There was a switchboard in which visitors could listen to gossip about the company from the 1920s and learn how meat was cured and canned a hundred years ago.192
Moving away from the more educational exhibits and into the fun and interactive, there was a giant size video screen of comedian Al Franken in the game show studio who led the
190 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 74; Mike Dougherty, “Spam Featured at Minnesota History Center’s ‘MN150’,” Post-Bulletin (Rochester, MN), 29 July 2010. 191 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 74; Michael Judge, “Delectable, Not Deletable: A Visit to the Spam Museum,” Wall Street Journal (New York City), 29 April 2004. 192 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 74; “Spam Museum Preserves the Tasty Legacy of Spiced Ham,” Dallas Morning News (Dallas, TX), 1 July 2002.
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‘Spam Exam,’ a test of Spam trivia. In ‘Chez Spam’ there was videos of famous chefs around the world who created Spam based dishes, such as Spam Musubi. In the ‘Spam Radio’ exhibit visitors listened to the Spam Girls signing Spam related tunes and early commercials that featured George Burns and Gracie Allen. There was also a Spam factory set up where visitors could try putting chunks of Spam into canisters.193
There was also coverage of Spam from World War II, when Spam became a legend. The canned meat was part of most soldiers’ rations. Hormel was one of many providers but it was all called "Spam" and they ate so much of it, they began to hate it. Hormel sent over 150 million pounds by the end of the war. President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to a retired Hormel president years later, "I ate my share of Spam along with millions of other soldiers. I'll even confess a few unkind remarks about it -- uttered during the strain of battle you understand. But as former Commander in Chief, I believe I can still officially forgive you your only sin: sending so much of it." The letter was displayed in the exhibit.194 The Spam Museum was all about relating the product to the lives of visitors and emphasized personal ties to the product in at different way than the Fairmount Historical Museum and Ava Gardner created local ties.
193 des Garennes, Great Little Museums of the Midwest, 75-76. 194 Wall Street Journal (New York City), 29 April 2004.
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Figure 15 Historic Camden Station in Baltimore, Maryland that houses Geppi’s Entertainment Museum on the second floor. Geppi’s Entertainment Museum (GEM) was a popular culture museum that tried to emphasize all popular culture history (figure 15). On September 8, 2006, GEM opened its doors in Baltimore, Maryland. GEM housed comic books, toys, dolls, posters, and other paraphernalia that represented American popular culture in seventeen thousand square feet on the second and third floors of the restored Camden Station building, above the Sports Legends at Camden Yards museum.195 Prior to the opening of GEM, museum curator Arnold Blumberg said, “the principal goal of Geppi’s Entertainment Museum is to show growth of popular culture” and visitors “will find things relevant to their interest while appreciating the bigger picture our museum tells about cultural elements that have shaped our nation.”196 Educational aspects, in the form of notes on presidents, population, events, and inventions, to corresponding time periods were outside each room to balance the memorabilia.197
195 George Gene Gustines, “Museum of Steel: Cartoon History in a Single Bound,” New York Times, 6 September 2006; Karen Leperi, “From Brus to Barbies,” Doll Reader 36, no. 3 (March/April 2007): 24. 196 Leperi, “From Brus to Barbies,” 24. 197 New York Times (New York City), 6 September 2006.
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In an effort to celebrate American history and the development of popular culture, GEM had eight period rooms of artifacts that traced popular culture and its social impact from 1776 to present. A tour of the museum began in ‘A Story in Four Colors’ which focused solely on the impact comic books made; ‘Pioneer Spirit 1776-1894’ where children’s dolls, boats, trains, and marbles educated them about the adult world, as well as entertained them; ‘Extra! Extra! 1895-
1927’ where characters such as the Yellow Kid, Buster Brown, and the Katzenjammer Kids comics in newspapers provided entertainment and social commentary for children and their parents; ‘When Heroes Unite 1928-1945’ showed how escapism from the Great Depression and
World War II could be found in newspaper comics, on radio shows, and at the movies; ‘America
Tunes In 1946-1960’ placed emphasis on how television took people to the old west and into deep space all from the comfort of home; ‘Revolution 1961-1970’ focused on how American teens led the nation into the future as the arrival of British rock and roll brought a new era of music and media; ‘Expanding Universe 1971-1990’ illustrated the shift from industry to an information-based economy as new media increased the entertainment available at home; and space for temporary exhibits that pertained to American popular culture traditions.198
Many of the artifacts displayed, the comics in particular, were valuable and kept behind safety glass but video kiosks were available for visitors to further explore the artifacts. In the case of Action Comics No. 1, which was the first appearance of Superman, people could view each page from the vintage copy on display, so it felt as though the visitor was reading the original. According to Steve Geppi, “the pages are yellowed with age, the original
198 Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, “Geppi’s Entertainment Museum -- THE ULTIMATE POP CULTURE EXPERIENCE;” available from http://www.geppismuseum.com/default.asp?t=1&m=1&c=52&s=496&ai=68875; Internet; accessed 19 February 2010.
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advertisements are included, and the monitor shows the rise and fall of each page as it is turned.”199
Geppi’s Entertainment Museum was a unique popular culture museum because it was dedicated to all popular culture, not just an element of it. When the museum opened in 2006, popular culture had legitimized as an academic field, there were numerous books compiled that studied aspects of popular culture, and there were journals with annual conferences. Multi- disciplinary academics were beginning to regularly include popular culture into their analysis because it represented what masses of people were interested in.
Figure 16 The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California near Schulz’s home. The Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center (The Peanuts Museum) was a museum that “embraces the Snoopy-inspired work of avant-garde artists, as well as genuine
199 New York Times (New York City), 6 September 2006.
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historical Snoopyabilia”200 (figure 16). As the Peanuts fiftieth anniversary approached the idea for the museum gained momentum and it opened in 2002, two years after Schulz’s death. The museum began as an idea by the artist’s wife, Jean.201 According to Wiley Lee Umphlett in
Mythmakers of the American Dream: The Nostalgic Vision in Popular Culture, the Peanuts characters are recognized by the general public in a similar way Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters. Umphlett wrote, the Peanuts “comic-strip world of these characters presents us with a language of visual simulation that is at once specific, symbolic, and universal, characteristics that in a fantasy and nostalgic sense both enclose and expand the real world.”202
The majority of the museum’s collection was the original cartoon strips; there were over seven thousand. There were also pages of doodles that were saved from the wastebasket by
Schulz’s secretary who carefully ironed them. On the second floor of the museum was a recreation of Schulz’s studio that included his drafting board that he used for the majority of his life, his desk, and armchair. The walls of the recreation were covered with notes and cards. In a nearby gallery, glass cases contained the artist’s personal belongings including a baseball mitt from his childhood, army sketchbook, family photos, and comics that Schulz had published before Peanuts.203
Also on display at the Peanuts museum was a wall that shows the evolution of Snoopy and Charlie Brown. The wall was removed from a Colorado Springs home where Schulz lived in
1951. It was long ago painted over but the last owners used Red Devil Sandy Liquid to uncover the drawings after hearing what may be on the wall. Snoopy was shown walking on four feet
200 Lovric, Cowgirls, Cockroaches, and Celebrity Lingerie, 184. 201 Lovric, Cowgirls, Cockroaches, and Celebrity Lingerie, 184. 202 Umphlett, Mythmakers of the American Dream, 83. 203 Lovric, Cowgirls, Cockroaches, and Celebrity Lingerie, 184-185
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instead of upright, and Charlie Brown was jumping over a candlestick. The owners donated the wall to the museum after hearing of its existence.204
The smaller, more focused popular culture museums that appeared in the last twenty-five years had many elements in common although the aspects of popular culture they represented were different. Most of the museums followed the preference Hilde Hein in The Museum in
Transition: A Philosophical Perspective and allowed the objects to lead the exhibit, rather than an experience. The objects used at the Houdini Historical Society, New Orleans Voodoo
Museum, Fairmount Historical Museum, Ava Gardner Museum, and Charles M. Schultz
Museum and Research Center were full of life and the interpretation was based on them.205 The
McDonald’s, Spam, and Geppi’s Entertainment museums were more in line with the museum literature about promoting experiences and engaging the visitors in a personal manner such as
The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life by Roy Rosenzweig and
David Thelen, as well as Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions by Kathleen McLean.206
The McDonald’s Museum and Spam Museum were both focused on food, the New
Orleans Voodoo Museum was about religion, Fairmount Historical Museum, Ava Gardner
Museum, and Houdini Historical Society pertained to celebrities, and the Museum of Comic and
Cartoon Art and Charles M. Schultz Museum and Research Center both concentrated on art.
Geppi’s Entertainment Museum was devoted to all forms of popular culture and where it fit into the larger historical context. The hope for increased tourism was a goal for the Houdini
Historical Society and Geppi’s Entertainment Museum. The historical society was in a small town in Wisconsin and Geppi’s was part of the revitalized inner harbor in Baltimore, both places always hoping to increase tourism. The Spam, McDonald’s, and Geppi’s Entertainment
204 Lovric, Cowgirls, Cockroaches, and Celebrity Lingerie, 185. 205 Hein, The Museum in Transition. 206 Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past and McLean, Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions.
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Museums were all funded from a single source. The Museum of Broadcasting was as well in the beginning. The singular source of funding at the founding of the museums allowed for a solid foundation that allowed the museum time to succeed. The New Orleans Historic Voodoo
Museum, Fairmount Historical Museum, Ava Gardner Museum, Houdini Historical Society,
Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, and Charles M. Schultz Museum and Research Center all could have had a fate similar to the New York Jazz Museum.
Popular culture museums raised funds through the same sources as any other museum: grants, admissions, gift shop sales, and fundraisers. But the key to popular culture museums fundraising depended on how engrossed the donors were in the subject matter. If donors were not interested in the subject matter, they would not donate. Corporations became large donors of museums in the late 1950s. Corporations used museums as instruments of public relations in the public policy arena. In 1960, Governor Nelson Rockefeller gained legislative approval for the
New York State Council on the Arts that laid the groundwork for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And in 1967, chairman of the board of
Chase Manhattan Bank David Rockefeller proposed the Business Committee for the Arts to encourage other business leaders to support the arts.207
In Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships by Mark
Rectanus, he argued that the merging of art, business, and museums were examples of the privatization of cultural funding. Rectanus wanted there to be full disclosure of corporate involvement in cultural events and examined how corporations, art institutions, and foundations were reshaping cultural terrain. In 1965, Phillip Morris organized and sponsored ‘Pop & Op’ featuring art by Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist. The touring exhibit and
Phillip Morris’ support of the arts became the company’s market expansion. Artists also work
207 Rectanus, Cultural Incorporated, 26.
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with corporations directly without institutions and foundations for middle men, as in the case of
Annie Leibovitz and American Express. Culture Incorporated strived to shine a light on the interests of corporations that sponsored culture as it examined the interrelationships between sponsors and sponsored culture.208
The McDonalds and Spam museums were sponsored by the corporations they represented. Although the McDonalds and Spam museums functioned as an advertisement for the brands they represented, the museums also focused heavily on the historical details of the brands. The Spam Museum emphasized spam’s place in people’s lives and the McDonalds
Museum recreated the original restaurant to show visitors how the model began. Both the Spam and McDonald’s Museums advertised for products and therefore allowed consumers to become visitors and reinforce their brand loyalty.
While issues such as funding made popular culture museums similar to history museums, art museums, and science centers, they still provide the unique mix of entertainment of popular culture with the education of museums. While these museums were smaller and had a more limited focus on their aspects of popular culture each museum, each museum still represented food, entertainment, celebrities, entertainers, and comics. The academic literature on these topics also grew considerably during the time that these museums opened from the 1970s through the
1990s. There was very little literature on the history and criticisms of comic art even in the 1980s but the topic exploded greatly in the late 1990s. Suddenly there was literature on how and why to read comics, how graphic novels work, what they meant, and how comic books needed more respect.209 The literature on Houdini and other magicians was produced earlier but really took off
208 Rectanus, Cultural Incorporated. 209 See Wiley Lee Umphlett, Mythmakers of the American Dream: The Nostalgic Vision in Popular Culture (New York: Bucknell University Press, 1983); Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998); Geoff Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (New York:
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at the beginning of the 21st century.210 There had been a great deal of literature on the entertainers in Hollywood but in 1988 the academic literature on the motion picture industry started to flourish.211
Continuum, 2002); Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007); and Paul Douglas Lopes, Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009). 210 See Vicki Cobb, Harry Houdini (New York City, NY: DK Publishers, 2005); Rita T. Mullin, Harry Houdini: Death-Defying Showman (New York City, NY: Sterling, 2007); and Kenneth Silverman, Houdini!: The Career of Ehrich Weiss : American Self-Liberator, Europe's Eclipsing Sensation, World's Handcuff King & Prison Breaker (New York City, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996); and William Lindsay Gresham, Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls (New York City, NY: Holt, 1959). 211 See Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York City, NY: Crown Publishers, 1988); Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York City, NY: Pantheon Books, 1988); Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); and John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., American Cinema and Hollywood: Critical Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
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CHAPTER 4 ‘EXPERIENCE’ MUSEUMS: A MORE RECENT DEVELOPMENT
The developments in more recent popular culture museums focused on the ‘experience’ of visitors. Experience museums used artifacts to tell a story and had a great deal of technology.
Popular culture centered around technology. How could technology not be used to enhance popular culture? According to Raymond Betts in A History of Popular Culture: More of
Everything, Faster and Brighter, “electricity gives popular culture its charge. Laser lights and neon signs, electric guitars and microphones, Game Boys and digital cameras – all these devices are obviously dependent on electricity and the list could easily be extended.”212 Part of the uniqueness of popular culture museums was that visitors learned about popular culture and participated in popular culture. When the visitors participated in museum programs, they enhanced their own experience. When the visitors told others of the experience the visitor brought the popular culture topic to even more people.
The museums selected for this chapter (figure 17) were all ‘experience’ museums. In The
Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage by B. Joseph Pine II and James
H. Gilmore argued that as the service economy peaked and “a new, emerging economy is coming to the fore, one based on a distinct kind of output.”213 According to Pine and Gilmore, goods and services were no longer enough, the experience of the consumer was. Each museum had large budgets, high tech exhibits, and told a story. These museums were different from the earlier reliquary museums because they were not focused on a singular specific topic, such as the
Ava Gardner Museum or Houdini Historical Society that displayed objects and information primarily, but covered a broader theme.
212 Betts, A History of Popular Culture, 2. 213 B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 11.
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Figure 17 Locations of ‘Experience’ popular culture museums. The popular culture museums in this chapter were: (1) Newseum, focused on the history of the news media; (2) Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design, emphasized the history of advertising; (3) Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum, spotlighted both music and science fiction; (4) International Spy Museum, where nothing was what it seemed; (5) Pirate
Soul Museum, centered their efforts on the history of the high seas; (6) Harley-Davidson
Museum, was one of many museums devoted to the motorcycle; and (7) the Grammy Museum, an American music history museum.
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Figure 18 Image from the opening of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. in 2008. The Newseum opened in Arlington, Virginia on April 18, 1997 (figure 18). At an early opening for press, journalists “seemed to take to it like children at a toy store.”214 At the opening the collection of journalism’s past included Ernie Pyle’s typewriter, Ernest Hemingway’s World
War II press credentials, the microphone Edward R. Murrow used during the Battle of Britain, and two pages of Bob Woodward’s coded notes taken during the Watergate investigation.215
Newseum fit into the ‘experience’ museum form because of the abundant use of technology as well as telling the story of how the field of journalism evolved.
The museum cost fifty million dollars to open and was paid for by The Freedom Forum with an endowment started in 1935 by Frank E. Gannett.216 Ralph Applebaum’s New York City firm designed the museum, along with the adjacent Freedom Park.217 The Newseum’s primary aim was at the general public with a combination of interactive technology and “old-fashioned razzle-dazzle” designed to entertain while it educated. In the ‘Ethics Center’ at the Newseum,
214 Mark Fitzgerald, “Temple of News,” Editor & Publisher 130, no. 17 (26 April 1997): 36. 215 Fitzgerald, “Temple of News,” 36. 216 William Powers, “Ad Newseum,” New Republic 216, no. 22 (2 June 1997): 12. 217 Fitzgerald, “Temple of News,” 36.
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visitors had the opportunity to take the role of the reporter or editor in the journalistic process.
Using an interactive video, the ‘reporter’ got an assignment and was introduced to sources and decided when and what to report. Each assignment was a case taken out of real life. Reporter
Mark Fitzgerald of Editor & Publisher, a monthly magazine that covered the newspaper industry, “role playing is a significant part of the experience at Newseum, visitors can make up a newspaper front page or put a picture of themselves on a magazine cover; they can anchor a TV newscast, report the weather, simulate a radio broadcast – and take home the tape.”218 Each tape went for fifteen dollars apiece.219
The ‘Video News Wall’ at the museum, at 126-foot-long by 12-foot-high, illustrated the immediacy and global reach of news through simultaneously showing up to thirty-six different news broadcasts from around the world. Current newspaper covers from nearly every state and twenty international papers were available to visitors as well, along with wire service terminals from the Associated Press and Reuters. The permanent news galleries appeared much more like a traditional museum.220 Newseum executive director Peter S. Prichard wrote, “by taking the visitors behind the scenes, we hope to forge a deeper public understanding about why and how news is reported. And we built it because we believe it is important to remind the public, in a highly visible way, of the great risks many journalists take to bring us the news.”221
In 2000, Newseum announced plans to close down their original location in Alexandria at the end of the lease and move to a soon to be built structure in downtown Washington, D.C. because the museum had outgrown the space. Peter Prichard wanted all of the focus to be on completing the new space on Pennsylvania Avenue. The space was expected to be a 555,000
218 Fitzgerald, “Temple of News,” 36. 219 Fitzgerald, “Temple of News,” 36. 220 Fitzgerald, “Temple of News,” 36. 221 Fitzgerald, “Temple of News,” 36.
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square foot complex that included the Freedom Forum’s headquarters, international conference center, restaurant and retail facilities, and with 100 housing units in the same building as the museum.222
The new Newseum opened April 11, 2008, and had more than ten thousand visitors on the first day.223 The complex, between the White House and the Capitol in downtown
Washington, D.C., cost $435 million and was funded by news industry sponsors and the
Freedom Forum.224 The 250,000 square foot museum of news offered visitors the opportunity to learn about five centuries of news history. The museum had seven floors of exhibits, galleries, and theaters full of technology and hands-on exhibits.225 The thirty-five thousand newspaper front pages as old as five hundred years, 6,214 artifacts, and 3,800 images in the museum collection helped support the Newseum mission to educate “the public about the value of free press in a free society and tell the stories of the world’s important events in unique and engaging ways.”226
In late 2001, an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal wrote, “No Newseum is good
Newseum.”227 The article felt that the Newseum was a “monument to media vanity” and that
“even self-love can have its limits.”228 The author wrote the Newseum and its expansion went against one of the core principles of journalism, that “the media aren’t the story; they just get the
222 “Freedom Forum Closes Newseum, Cuts News,” Quill 90, no. 1 (January/February 2002): 8. 223 The Newseum, “Newseum/Key Dates;” available from http://www.newseum.org/press-info/press-materials/key- dates/index.html; Internet; accessed on 7 March 2012. 224 Deborah Potter, “Why Journalism Matters,” American Journalism Review 30, no. 2 (April/May 2008): 50; The Newseum, “Newseum/About the Newseum;” available from http://www.newseum.org/about/overview/about.aspx?item=coreMessages&style=b; Internet accessed on 29 January 2010. 225 The Newseum, “Newseum/Press Info;” available from http://www.newseum.org/press_info/press_materials/about.aspx?item+about_newseum&style=b; Internet accessed on 29 January 2010. 226 “Newseum/About the Newseum;” Internet accessed on 29 January 2010. 227 “Comment: Journalism,” The Wall Street Journal (New York City), 28 November 2001: A16. 228 “Comment: Journalism,” The Wall Street Journal (New York City), 28 November 2001: A16.
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story.”229 At the 2008 reopening, Deborah Potter of the American Journalism Review asked why people would visit the museum and pay $20 when most people did not have a good opinion of news media. Paul Sparrow, a Newseum vice president, said it was because it was entertaining, engaging, and put visitors face-to-face with history.230 The museum also met the six principles of interpretation set by Freeman Tilden in Interpreting Our Heritage.231
Figure 19 Exhibit of the history of Santa Claus at the Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design in Milwaukee, Wisconsin opened on
October 20, 2000 (figure 19). The museum was named for William F. Eisner, a Milwaukee
Institute of Art and Design trustee and according to museum curator, Charles Sable, the museum was fit for anyone interested in advertising. Sable said, “we want people to be enlightened, informed, and entertained, whether they’re a copywriter from an ad agency, a graphic designer or just the general public.”232 The exhibits revolved around how advertising and design were affected by the culture at the time it was created. Plans at the opening were for the museum to host five changing interactive exhibits at all times with the first cycle focused on the Burma
229 “Comment: Journalism,” The Wall Street Journal (New York City), 28 November 2001: A16. 230 Potter, “Why Journalism Matters,” 50. 231 Tilden, Interpreting, 18. 232 Mae Anderson, “Bringing Back History,” Adweek Eastern Edition 41, no. 40 (2 October 2000): 8.
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Shave signs, Guinness posters, automobile designs from the 1960s, shopping-bag art and psychodemographic profiling. Later in the fall, an exhibit on campaign advertising was planned.233
In 2003, The Eisner exhibited ‘Up in Smoke,’ chronicled “a country’s love affair with the cigarette, and how the romance went sour,” with tobacco ads from the early 1900s to present.234
The exhibit, included both print and broadcast, was loaned from One Club, a New York based advertising industry group. The earliest advertisement was from a French magazine circa 1900 that was selling rolling paper. By the 1920s, cigarette-rolling machines increased production for tobacco companies and advertising took off. Celebrities such as Amelia Earhart, Ronald Reagan, and Bing Crosby were featured in the ads of the 1930s. Other themes in the exhibit included health, beauty, and relaxation. The tobacco industry ads were juxtaposed against anti-smoking adverting that was half the exhibit. The exhibit ran from February through mid-June.235
The Eisner was an interactive museum that focused on advertising and design, and their cultural impact.236
233 Anderson, “Bringing Back History,” 8. 234 Doris Hajewski, “Milwaukee Exhibit Reviews a Century of Tobacco Advertising,” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), 21 February 2003. 235 The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), 21 February 2003. 236 The Eisner, “The Eisner/About/Mission;” available from http://www.theeisner.com/about/mission.php; Internet; accessed 6 March 2012.
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Figure 20 Roots and Branches at Experience Music Project in Seattle, Washington. Experience Music Project, a $240 million dollar worship house to rock opened June 23,
2000, as a combination museum and interactive fun house (figure 20). The opening included concerts by Metallica, Dr. Dre and Kid Rock. The EMP, a phenomenon created by Paul Allen co-founder of Microsoft, was a 140,000 square foot “collision of colors and curves” designed by
Frank O. Gehry next to the Seattle Space Needle.237 The only instruction given to Gehry by
237 David Fricke, “The $240 Million Temple of Rock: Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project Opens in Seattle,” Rolling Stone (July 2000): 41-48.
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Allen was for the building to be ‘swoopy.’ Gehry used the “feminine lines and vivid hues of electric guitars” for inspiration from the design.238
The center of EMP was the ‘Sky Church,’ a hall dominated by a large indoor video wall that was a forty by seventy foot creation. At ‘Crossroads,’ an intersection between exhibit spaces, was 'Roots and Branches,' a two story display of instruments created by Trimpin, a
Seattle-area sculptor. ‘Artist’s Journey’ was a multimedia tour through compressed episodes of pop history. ‘Sound Lab’ provided hands on experience where visitors could “learn to riff to
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ remix a Eurhythmics track or just make a racket at the electronic drum circle.”239 Also included in a ticket at the opening of EMP was a digital handheld-guided tour. In the ‘Northwest Passage Room’ was about the story of how grunge developed from grass roots in
Seattle to a large community.240
The collection on display at EMP included more than twelve hundred artifacts and nearly eighty thousand more in an off-site storage facility. All the artifacts were acquired in just eight years. In 1992, Allen assembled a brainstorming group with the purpose to create a Hendrix museum. Allen already owned Jimmy Hendrix’s Woodstock Strat and his hat from the Smash
Hits photo. In Time Passages: Collective Memory and Popular Culture, George Lipsitz wrote that nothing better illustrated the 1960s counter-culture than the personal history of Jimi Hendrix.
Hendrix famously fused black and white music through the adapted use of traditional blues techniques and contemporary technology. Lipsitz explained, “his virtuosity and apocalyptic sensuality had powerful appeal for middle-class youths eager to blot out the ugly realities of everyday life.”241
238 Fricke, “The $240 Million Temple of Rock,” 41-48. 239 Fricke, “The $240 Million Temple of Rock,” 41-48. 240 Fricke, “The $240 Million Temple of Rock,” 41-48. 241 Lipsitz, Time Passages, 129.
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Senior curator Peter Blecha stated that while EMP expanded rapidly beyond a Hendrix focus, the staff did not spend recklessly. “We developed a philosophy early on – we don’t have everything, and we do have budgets.”242 EMP was registered as a nonprofit organization with the
United States government and in funding acquisitions; Allen was considered a ‘major donor.’
Just before the opening of EMP, Paul Allen said, that the music of Jimi Hendrix showed him a path forward and that “we’re trying to take forward the concept of a museum, to give people a path that can lead them on their own journey.”243
Figure 21 A Yoda reproduction from Science Fiction Museum.
242 Fricke, “The $240 Million Temple of Rock,” 41-48. 243 Fricke, “The $240 Million Temple of Rock,” 41-48.
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At a news conference in April 2003, Allen announced plans for a new science-fiction museum to open in the summer 2004 at Experience Music Project (figure 21). The new thirteen thousand square foot space was expected to cost up to twenty million dollars, that Allen was expected to fund. In the collection at the announcement were Capt. James T. Kirk’s command chair from the original “Star Trek” series, a signed first edition of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy, and a first edition of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”244
The new museum was tentatively named The Science Fiction Experience, or SFX, and set to be built where ‘Artist’s Journey' was, which closed in January 2003. The museum plans included a gallery of sci-fi icons, inventions they inspired, and a science fiction ‘Hall of Fame.’
The section titled ‘Brave New Worlds’ examined different versions of the future and included ones seen in movies, ‘Them!’ displayed the strangest of creatures from books and movies, and
‘Make Contact’ focused on education outreach. EMP chief executive Bob Santelli said, “we’re interested in science fiction becoming more credible in American education.”245
The new addition was originally run as a separate institution from EMP, but shared a location and some museum resources. According to The Seattle Times, the creation was SFX was the biggest change to date, which had previously been exclusively dedicated to popular-music history and programs. Key factors in the development of the new museum were financial struggles at EMP, despite initial funding from Allen. EMP laid off forty-six employees in
February 2003. The Science Fiction Museum and Experience Music Project were expected to encourage each other’s ticket sales; the new project was expected to add 150,000 to 200,000 visitors to EMP’s half-million annually. At the end of the announcement, Santelli said, “both
244 Young Chang, “Microsoft Co-Founder Plans to Open Science-Fiction Museum in Seattle,” The Seattle Times (Seattle, WA), 18 April 2004. 245 The Seattle Times (Seattle, WA), 18 April 2004.
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music and science fiction are products of American pop culture, we are interested in not only the musical aspects of pop culture, but the great synergy between the two.”
Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum were nearly perfect representations of the museums emphasized in Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and are Changed. EMP and SFX were museums that influenced by elements around them and attempted to influence the world around them. Through the collection of essays, the editors,
Simon Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, and Sheila Watson, argued that museums were "constantly in flux," which the quick transformations at EMP/SFX illustrated.246
Figure 22 Interior of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. The International Spy Museum opened in Washington, D.C. on July 19, 2002 (figure 22).
It claimed to be the only museum open in the United States "dedicated to espionage and the only one in the world to provide a global perspective on an all-but-invisible profession that has shaped
246 Knell, MacLeod, and Watson, Museum Revolutions, xxv.
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history and continues to have significant impact on world events."247 The museum told the stories of individual spies and provided a setting to understand espionage and its impact on current and historic events.248 To tell the historical stories, the museum brought in aspects of popular culture to help pull in the visitor. The museum used stories of how famous athletes, celebrities, and chefs were involved in spying during the Cold War, as well as the fictional character of James Bond. The museum even had a replica Aston Martin Bond car with a rear bulletproof shield, tire shredder, machine guns, and a revolving license plate on display. It also provided numerous educational resources including lesson plans, pre-field trip materials, and professional development workshops.249
The Malrite Company based in Cleveland, Ohio created the museum. The company develops contemporary museums and educational projects around the U.S. and the creative team consisted of research directors, museum and exhibition designers, video and computer developers, as well as architects and interior designers.250 The District of Columbia provided $22 million in bonds to build the museum as part of the numerous urban revitalization initiatives in the city since the late 1990s and the rest was privately funded for the $40 million museum. Since opening the in 2002, the museum has had over five million visitors despite the $18 admission.251
When visitors began the tour through the permanent exhibit they start with ‘Covers and
Legends.’ Visitors were urged to adopt a cover identity from the many on the wall and were
247 International Spy Museum, “About/Spy Museum;” available from http://www.spymuseum.org/about; Internet; accessed 6 October 2011. 248 International Spy Museum, “FAQ/Spy Museum;” available from http://www.spymuseum.org/faq; Internet; accessed 6 October 2011. 249 International Spy Museum, “Educator Resources/Spy Museum;” available from http://www.spymuseum.org/educator-resources; Internet; accessed 6 October 2011. 250 International Spy Museum, “FAQ/Spy Museum;” available from http://www.spymuseum.org/faq; Internet; accessed 6 October 2011. 251 John Philipp Baesler, “International Spy Museum,” Journal of American History 98, no. 1 (June 2011): 138; Philip Shenon, “TRAVEL ADVISORY: CORRESPONDENT’S REPORT; New Museum Explores The Art of Espionage,” New York Times (New York City), 14 July 2002.
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explained the importance of keeping their cover. There were examples of identification documents on display that a spy would use. Visitors then watched the introductory video and move onto ‘School for Spies’ where they learned about microdots, invisible ink, buttonhole cameras, submarine recording systems, bugs, and disguise techniques developed in Hollywood for the CIA. The exhibit covered fifty years of spy technology, some still used today. The ‘Secret
History of History’ traveled "back through the centuries to the earliest moments of the second oldest profession."252 It explained the stories of spies that were effective because of the unlikeliest of them being spies, such as Josephine Baker and Julia Child. ‘From Ballroom to
Battlefield: A Spy’s Eye View of the Civil War’ showed how intelligence shaped the Civil War through the use of gadgets, documents, and storytelling to highlight the successes and failures during the war. The exhibit ‘Spies Among Us’ illustrated the moves made by German and
Russian spies in the United States during World War II and American spies working abroad.
‘War of the Spies’ took visitors into post-World War II Berlin to learn about the actions of spies during the Cold War. ‘The 21st Century’ was a film that explained the challenges of intelligence today and the last exhibit, ‘Weapons of Mass Disruption,’ demonstrated how the Internet allowed everyone to be vulnerable to cyber-attacks.253
252 International Spy Museum, “Exhibits/Spy Museum;” available from http://www.spymuseum.org/exhibits; Internet; accessed 6 October 2011. 253 “Exhibits/Spy Museum;” Internet; accessed 6 October 2011
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Figure 23 The Pirate Soul Museum with a pirate actor in Key West, Florida. In early 2004, Pat Croce, best known for being president of the Philadelphia 76ers and as a best-selling motivational guru, announced his intention to open a pirate museum in Key West,
Florida, “once a base for sea faring outlaws”254 (figure 23). Croce said, “It will be a great museum, a Disney-quality attraction. We’ll have a theme retail shop and a bar and a tavern restaurant. We want to take you back 300 years, on a crazy island. You’ll travel through history into a time where you will see real treasure and weapons.”255 The founder focused on selling the experience and designed the museum to enhance the visitor experience; a destination for those looking to spend their leisure time being entertained. Pirate Soul Museum dealt in historical fact as well as Hollywood interpretations of pirates.
254 “Former 76ers president Croce plans pirate museum for Key West,” Canadian Online Explorer 5 January 2004. 255 Rachel Spivak, “Pat Croce’s family collaborates on new pirate museum in Key West,” The Daily Collegian Online (University Park, Pennsylvania), 27 January 2004.
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Pirate Soul Museum opened its doors for the first time on January 5, 2005. A press release after the opening stated, “A $10 million project, Pirate Soul houses a unique collection of authentic pirate artifacts coupled with elements of interactive technology revealing a historic adventure through the Golden Age of Piracy and the lives of the era’s pirates. With the please touch and audio-animatronics of a Disney World coupled with the provenance of the
Smithsonian Institution, guests undertake an awesome pirate journey filled with compelling lore and surprising fact.”256 The museum established a fun environment that placed pirates in a scholarly context. Croce believed Key West to be the ideal location for Pirate Soul because of its semi-tropical climate, island location, and steady stream of visitors. Museum design firm
Gallagher and Associates brought the lives and times of pirates like Captain Kidd and
Blackbeard to life.257
The five thousand square foot museum held five hundred artifacts, including the “original journal of Captain Kidds last voyage, the only authentic pirate treasure chest in America originally belonging to Captain Thomas Tew, Blackbeard’s original blunderbuss, a rare 1696
Wanted poster for the dreaded Henry Every,” an assortment of rare pirate gold, cannonballs, weaponry, flags, books, maps, clothing and original pirate broadsides and proclamations.258 The tour, either self-guided or audio, began at a recreation of Port Royal, once a stronghold for
Jamaican pirates, and ended on the deck of a pirate ship listening to the simulated talking head of
Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard, who was killed by the British in 1718. In between there were computer ‘journals’ that gave details on famous pirates and entries from their logs.259 The audio-
256 “Motivational Guru Pat Croce Opens Pirate Soup Museum in Key West,” Pirate Soul Museum press release, 26 January 2005, on Pirate Soul website http://www.piratesoul.com/press_detail.aspx?id=12, accessed 20 February 2010. 257 “Pirate Soul Adds Big Offsite Events Venue, A Rarity in the Keys,” Meeting News 29, no. 4 (21 March 2005): 29. 258 “Motivational Guru Pat Croce Opens Pirate Soup Museum,” Pirate Soul Museum press release, 26 January 2005. 259 “Key West pirate museum deserves and ‘arrrrh’ rating,” Sacramento Bee, 24 July 2005.
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animatronics, “one of the most unusual and jarring elements” of the museum, was an experience devised by a Disney Imaginer. Visitors went into a tiny, dark, locked room. It was a restricted sensory experience where visitors heard and felt things “like wind blowing in your ear, cannon fire explosions” in an effort to live through Blackbeard’s last battle.260 The subject of the exhibits
“become less cartoonish and more complex characters in the context of the times they lived – more libertarians, people who sought the comparative ‘democracy’ and equal opportunity of piracy, than psychopaths or sociopaths.”261
The Pirate Soul Museum moved from Key West to St. Augustine, Florida in December
2010 when museum founder Pat Croce “discovered that visitors in Key West were more interested in partying than museum going.”262 After the move, the museum was renamed the St.
Augustine Pirate & Treasure Museum and the exhibits were expanded. The Florida Division of
Historical Resources gave access to their collection of shipwreck treasures, something they had never done before.263 The Pirate Soul Museum was similar to the Delta Blues Museum in that it also became part of popular culture and the narrative through the Disneyfied aspects of the museum.
260 Karen Rubin, “Key West: Shipwrecks, Pirates & A Sovereign State of Mind,” Travel Writers’ Magazine, 2 June 2009. 261 Rubin, “Key West: Shipwrecks, Pirates & A Sovereign State of Mind,” 2 June 2009. 262 Warren Resen, “Pirates Land in St. Augustine…Permanently,” The Observer News (Ruskin, FL), 14 April 2011, accessed on 6 March 2012, http://www.observernews.net/thisweek/features/trips_worth_taking/3519-Pirates-land- Augustinepermanently.html. 263 The Observer News (Ruskin, FL), 14 April 2011.
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Figure 24 A personalized motorcycle at the Harley-Davidson Museum. The long awaited opening of the Harley Davidson Museum happened on July 12, 2008
(figure 24). Plans were announced in 1999 to open a for-profit museum but were cancelled in
2002 because of massive cost escalations to a 19th century building. In early 2004, a new twenty- acre location in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s Menomonee Valley was selected. The museum was expected to be a major tourist attraction for the city, as well as bring hundreds of jobs to the
Menomonee Valley. The first phase of the project was to build the $60 million, 110,250 square foot museum and adjacent restaurant. The second phase was the $15 million, 20,000 square foot building to house the archives and restoration department. The final, yet to be completed, phase was to build a $20 million, one hundred thousand square foot office development that could bring as many as four hundred jobs to the valley, including technical training facilities for Harley
Davidson.264
264 Tom Daykin, “Harley Davidson museum to bring dollars, jobs to Milwaukee,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), 21 January 2004.
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The museum, designed by Jim Biber of Pentagram Architecture in New York, and broken into three separate, boxy units connected by glass skywalks, totaling 130,000 square feet.265
Estimates prior to opening put visitation at 350,000 annually, bringing $39 million a year to hotels, restaurant meals, and bar tabs.266 Prior to the opening of the Harley Davidson Museum,
Milwaukee businesses were prepared for an increase in sales. Southeastern Wisconsin Harley-
Davidson dealers expanded to meet the needs of riders expected to visit Milwaukee to see the museum. Service departments bought new service trucks, hired more technicians, and increased the number of bikes available for rental.267 Tourism spending rose 3.3% in 2008, despite a national economic recession according to a study commissioned by Visit Milwaukee. Though part of the rise was attributed to the Harley-Davidson Museum, there was also the Potawatomi
Bingo Casino expansion, the opening of the Iron Horse Hotel, and the Harley Davidson 105th
Anniversary Celebration.268
Inside the museum visitors spent approximately an hour and a half with stories to read, buttons to push, and a collection of ten motorcycles to sit on. Inside, the exhibit began with a
Harley engine because the motorcycles started with the engine. Curatorial director Jim Fricke said, “the engine is always like the jewel and they built the bikes around the jewel.”269 Just past the engine was ‘Serial Number One,’ the oldest-known Harley-Davidson from 1903. Also on display were personalized bikes, a wall devoted to pictures of bikers and their bikes, posters, ads, clothes, trophies, footage of motorcycling, and a design lab that showed how bikes were
265 Whitney Gould, “Industrial inspiration offers urban elegance for Harley,” The Milwaukee Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), 25 February 2006. 266 Tom Daykin, “From the ground up: Construction of Harley-Davidson museum rumbles on,” The Milwaukee Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), 30 March 2007. 267 Thomas Content, “Harley dealers prepare for more business with museum opening: Riders are expected to travel to Milwaukee,” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), 11 July 2008. 268 Tom Daykin, “Tourism spending in Milwaukee rose 3.3% in 2008,” The Milwaukee Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), 13 May 2009. 269 Troy Melhus, “Hog heaven: A new Milwaukee showcase,” Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), 6 July 2008.
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developed. Journalist Troy Melhus, a biker himself, said, “this is a place that does more than celebrate the motorcycle. It celebrates the life that surrounds it.”
Figure 25 The educational and interactive Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, California. The Grammy Museum began as a project to bring an American music history museum to
New Orleans, Louisiana but due to budget explosions and in fighting, the National Academy of
Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS), the organization behind the Grammy Awards, pulled their support due to “feasibility issues”270 (figure 25). In 2005, NARAS agreed to support the Grammy
Museum as part of a LA Live development, a $1 billion, 5.5 million-square-foot sports,
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), 6 July 2008. 270 “Nat. Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences rejects proposal for Grammy Awards museum in New Orleans,” New Orleans CityBusiness (New Orleans, LA), 22 December 2003. See also Kevin Zimmerman, “Grammy Museum stuck in La. Lyrics law mire,” VARIETY, The International Entertainment Weekly 347, no. 67 (15 June 1992): 67, 69; Brett Clanton, “Developer wants to put Grammy museum in N.O.,” New Orleans CityBusiness (New Orleans, LA) 21, no. 27 (25 December 2000): 7; Brett Clanton, “Grammy museum must get boost from city coffers,” New Orleans CityBusiness (New Orleans, LA), 26 November 2001, 7; Brett Clanton, “Grammy museum faces financing obstacles,” New Orleans CityBusiness (New Orleans, LA), 22 April 2002, 5-6; Brett Clanton, “Grammy museum advancing, but faces more hurdles,” New Orleans CityBusiness (New Orleans, LA), 10 June 2002, 5-6; “Fat lady yet to sing on Grammy museum,” New Orleans CityBusiness (New Orleans, LA), 2 June 2003, 1, 55; Holly Miller, “Interview with director of La. Music Commission,” New Orleans CityBusiness (New Orleans, LA), 12 January 2004.
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entertainment, and residential complex run by Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG). AEG hoped the museum would bring in one million visitors a year.271
The Grammy Museum opened on December 3, 2008 with a weeklong celebration of the history of music. On December 3rd, there was a VIP reception with festivities that recognized the fifty-year legacy of the Grammy Awards, December 4th was a gala fundraising concert, and educational tours with a special launch ceremony on December sixth when the museum officially opened to the public.
The Grammy Museum, “a 21st century museum, heavy on educational and interactive displays,”272 used artifacts to enhance the story. The museum was organized to display and interpret the history of recorded music back to 1870. Museum executive director Bob Santelli said, “It goes way beyond celebrating the Grammy Awards. It’s about making people more sophisticated listeners and inspiring critical thinking.”273 According to David Sanjek in “They
Work Hard for Their Money,” an article from American Popular Music: New Approaches to the
Twentieth Century, a Grammy Award was a sign of professional respectability.274
The $34 million, thirty-two thousand square foot museum had three floors of exhibit space filled with artifacts, sound stations, and interactive video elements that depict how music was created, recorded, and consumed. The museum covered 160 musical genres, photos and footage of fifty years of Grammy ceremonies, as well as costumes and instruments. The tour began on the top floor of the museum with wall-sized video screens and the ‘Crossroads Table,’ a touch display that showed visitors how music genres interconnect. The table had “interactive
271 Beth Barrett, “Los Angeles entertainment complex pictured as downtown hub,” Daily News (Los Angeles, CA), 14 September 2005. “Grammy Museum intro is set,” Hollywood Reporter – International Edition, 6 June 2008, 40. 272 Phil Gallo, “L.A. Grammy Museum set for closeup,” Dailey Variety gotham (New York City), 1 December 2008, 1. 273 Dailey Variety gotham (New York City), 1 December 2008, 1. 274 Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick, eds., American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century, (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 24.
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maps highlight the musical legacies of various American cities, and short video series delve into emerging music styles from the past five decades and how the correspond with pop culture.”275
The middle floor of Grammy Museum was devoted to songwriting and the writing process. It contained profiles of producers and industry-shaping executives on the walls and eight simulated sound booths for visitors to try their hands at rapping, singing, mixing songs, building beats and mastering songs. Also on the second floor was an exhibit on the history of the Grammy awards with trophies, photos, and footage of the most memorable moments.
The last floor of the museum hosted special exhibits and a two hundred-seat theater for lectures, meetings and intimate performances.276 The first of the special exhibits, ‘Songs of
Conscience, Sounds of Freedom,’ explored the two hundred year history of music and politics in
America and the political force in society and used of a hundred artifacts and seventy photographs from government archives and private collections. The exhibit delved into how music had given Americans a fundamental means for enacting political values. With the use of artifacts, images, multimedia kiosks, film and music, the exhibit investigated the “extent and effectiveness of political song in American history, the creative process of political songwriting, and music’s social function as a source for information, inspiration and public protest.”277
According to Sanjek, analysis of the music industry was undeveloped and a wide-open field of study. He stated, “for the moment we would be wise to lower our expectations and begin with the study of people making, selling, and listening to music.”278 The Grammy Museum could help to bridge the gap if they explained how they researched and developed their exhibits.
275 Sandy Cohen, “Record, study and hear music at the new Grammy Museum; encompasses 50 years,” The Canadian Press (Toronto, Ontario), 3 December 2008. 276 The Canadian Press (Toronto, Ontario), 3 December 2008. 277 “Events (GRAMMY Museum opens with exhibition Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom),” SING OUT! 52, no. 3 (Autumn 2008): 12-13. 278 Rubin and Melnick, American Popular Music, 26-27.
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‘Experience’ museums were about the visitors’ experience. They used artifacts to tell a story and a vast array of technology. But ‘experience’ museums were not a unique phenomenon.
There was also the expERIEnce Children’s Museum, APEX (African American Panoramic
Experience) Museum, and the Arizona Experience Museum to name a few. Retailers also focused on enhancing shoppers’ experiences to get them to buy.279 Visitors in museums were similar to customers in a store or guests at amusement parks. Customers want an experience in addition to whatever product they purchase. Gilmore and Pine stated, “the value of the experience lingers in the memory of any individual who was engaged by the event.”280 The emphasis on fun and pleasure in popular culture museums helped other types of museums to become friendlier, playful places. When the American History Museum reopened after a two- year renovation it incorporated American music to the entrance and the Smithsonian later hosted a movie premiere in the museum.
Experience museums borrowed heavily from theme parks and the entertainment industry.
At Walt Disney World, opened in 1971, guests were immersed in rides that entertained, but also in an unfolding story. According to Pine and Gilmore, “for every guest, cast members (never
“employees”) staged a complete production of sights, sounds, tastes, aromas, and textures to create a unique experience.”281 The experience museums were more visual than verbal, more emotional than intellectual, and shamelessly focused on fun.282 The ‘experience’ museum was about storytelling. Museums such as Newseum, Experience Music Project/Science Fiction
Museum, Harley-Davidson Museum, and Grammy Museum had all been criticized for being worshipful and self-glorifying of their subject while other, reliquary popular culture museums
279 Pine and Gilmore, The Experience Economy, 15-16. 280 Pine and Gilmore, The Experience Economy, 12. 281 Pine and Gilmore, The Experience Economy, 3. 282 “Museums Shake it up in Theme-Park Style,” The Record (Kitchener/Cambridge/Waterloo, Ontario) 25 March 2006.
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had not been. Attraction was separated from the museum because experience museums were still grounded in historical fact.
All of the museums discussed in this chapter used a great deal of technology, which helped visitors become engaged with the museums content. Kiosks are able to provide more information than fits on the walls if visitors want it. Visitors at the International Spy Museum,
Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design, and Newseum had interactive kiosks. Pirate Soul
Museum used Disney engineers and made visitors feel like they were on a ship with cannons being launched. Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Grammy Museum both had giant walls of videos to immerse visitors in the subject matter and Harley-David Museum had motorcycles to sit on and buttons to push that revealed more information on the motorcycles.
Hilde S. Hein, in The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective, museums had shifted their focus from objects to experiences and that it could be disadvantageous. Hein made her personal preference known, that objects were full of life and information. She compared experience exhibits, in some cases, to theme parks.283 In ‘experience’ museums artifacts were used as evidence to help create the experience.
The Harley-Davidson Museum, Pirate Soul Museum, Eisner Museum of Advertising and
Design, and Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum were a funded from a single source when they were founded. The solid funding in the beginning allowed for the museums to find time to succeed. The Harley-Davidson Museum also worked as an advertisement for the motorcycles. When Pirate Soul Museum did not do as well as expected, Pat Croce who founded the museum, moved it to St. Augustine, which has allowed the museum to flourish.
The ‘experience’ popular culture museums had broader fields than smaller reliquary popular culture museums. The broader fields allow them to appeal to more visitors. The
283 Hein, The Museum in Transition.
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‘experience’ museums were also in larger cities that already had a large number of tourists and other activities for tourists to do, giving the ‘experience’ museums an advantage over the smaller reliquary museums in small towns.
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CONCLUSION TRANSFORMERS: POPULAR CULTURE MUSEUMS THROUGH TIME
While there were many different aspects of popular culture, there were two types of popular culture museums: reliquary and experience. Reliquary museums were focused on a singular specific topic that displayed objects and information primarily and experience museums used objects and information to tell a story. The popular culture museums and their topics represented in this thesis provided insight and commentary on society and historical events.
Museum-going at popular culture museums became a fun way for visitors not just to learn about popular culture but partake in it.
Popular culture was about fun and pleasure, but it was not frivolous. Ray Browne promoted a serious field in the 1960s that enveloped the “everyday world around us: the mass media, entertainments, and diversions.”284 Some popular culture museums also strived to serve a larger, more important purpose. When the Museum of Broadcasting was founded its goal was to preserve the audio and video heritage of everything from advertising to soap operas. The Cartoon
Art Museum placed emphasis on preserving and documenting a unique art form, similar to the
Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art because comics and cartoon art were instrumental in documenting and interpreting historic events and social change. And the mission of Geppi’s
Entertainment Museum was to show the growth of popular culture and how the bigger picture of the cultural elements have shaped the United States.
Aficionados of particular types of popular culture started the early popular culture museums: Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, New
York Jazz Museum, Delta Blues Museum, Museum of Broadcasting, Cartoon Art Museum, and
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. The reliquary museums were shrines of the aspect of
284 2002 Americana, “Conversation with Professor Ray B. Browne;” Internet; accessed 25 January 2010.
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popular culture they were interested in that primarily displayed objects. The museumification of popular culture helped validate the academic study of popular culture, while popular culture research provided the basis for interpretation in museums. The multidisciplinary literature on popular culture fields such as music, film, and cartoon art expanded greatly from the 1980s onward. This literature served as a basis for research and interpretation in museum exhibits and a place for visitors to delve deeper into a topic if an exhibit sparked an interest.
Popular culture museums also had other common elements. The Museum of
Broadcasting, McDonald’s Museum, Spam Museum, Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, Eisner
Museum of Advertising and Design, Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum, Pirate
Soul Museum, and Harley-Davidson Museum all had a singular source that provided funding when they were built and first opened. In the cases of the McDonald’s, Spam, and Harley-
Davidson museums, they advertised for a product. This allowed for visitors to become consumers and consumers to become visitors. The museums reinforced brand loyalty. For the
Broadcasting, Eisner, Geppi’s, EMP/SFM, and Pirate Soul museums the singular source of funding also allowed for the museums to grow a visitor base and which in turned raised more funding that earlier museums such as the Cartoon Art, New York Jazz, and Delta Blues museums had difficulty with.
An additional element that popular culture museums had in common was the desire to increase community engagement. The New York Jazz, Broadcasting, Cartoon Art, and New
Orleans Voodoo museums all hoped to convey their passion for their topics to the visitor. The museums were able to do so by providing lively music, numerous videos to watch, discussions to participate in, and spirited tours to go on. Further, the Country Music, Delta Blues, Rock and
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Roll, Houdini, Geppi’s, EMP/SFM, and Harley-Davidson museums hoped to increase tourism.
The lively, appealing museums did so through promotion of their museums and their topics.
One more theme that the popular culture museums shared was technology, particularly with experience museums. The Broadcasting, Country Music, Rock and Roll, Spam, and Geppi’s
Entertainment museums also used technology. Popular culture centered around technology and it helped enhance the visitor experience in museums. At the Pirate Soul Museum, “visitors experience the sounds and tumult of a high-seas battle after being menaced by an animatronic
Blackbeard.”285 Along with the interactive experiences and gadgets the museums also had stylish graphics, movies, and multimedia. All of the elements helped to tell the story. The immersive environments in the highly technological environments were needed if museums hoped to take on five hundred television channels, the Internet, video games, and theme parks.
The literature on popular culture is broad and well developed. There were critical approaches as well as more mainstream. Time Passages, by George Lipsitz, dealt with collective memory and popular culture in the United States since 1945. The McDonald’s and Spam museums both played upon visitors’ collective memory and their place within it at their museums. Lipsitz felt the two ideas were linked and that the reach of mass media exploited social hierarchies and placed consumer desire as the “logical center of human existence.”286
Mythmakers of the American Dream: The Nostalgic Vision in Popular Culture, by Wiley Lee
Umphlett, illustrated the concerns that “certain visual trends and influences of our popular culture may have contributed to impairing our visual perception.”287 Umphlett described how people had been conditioned to see the world around them with the same perspectives taken in
285 The Record (Kitchener/Cambridge/Waterloo, Ontario) 25 March 2006. 286 Lipsitz, Time Passages, vii. 287 Umphlett, Mythmakers of the American Dream, 7.
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fiction, comic-strip art, movies, and television.288 The nostalgia Umphlett emphasized was present at the Cartoon Art Museum, Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, as well as the Museum of Broadcasting. Popular culture museums have the ability to help shape the popular culture literature as Experience Music Project demonstrated. EMP produced their own literature on popular culture. In 2002, Yes, Yes, Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-
Hop’s First Decade was published. The text illustrated how hip-hop was created on the streets of the Bronx in New York in the 1970s and “rose out of gang-dominated street culture.”289 Yes, Yes,
Y’all began as a series of filmed interviews for the ‘Hip-Hop Nation’ exhibit and oral history program at EMP by Jim Fricke.290
Popular culture museums teach public historians that transformations can help museums do better, reach more people, and survive tough economic climates about museums. The
Museum of Broadcasting transformed into the Museum of Television and Radio, then transformed again into the Paley Center for Media. The transformations allowed the museum to incorporate new forms of media that were invented after the museum originally opened, such as the Internet and cell phones. It also allowed the museum to double the number of panels and interview sessions it held. When Pirate Soul Museum transformed into the St. Augustine Pirate
& Treasure Museum they gained access to shipwreck treasures from the Florida Division of
Historical Resources, something that no other organizations had been able to do. They also expanded their visitor base, the reason behind the museums move. After opening the museum in
Key West the founder discovered that tourists in Key West were too focused on drinking and fun on the beach. The Newseum did not transform as much as expand. It moved to a larger space
288 Umphlett, Mythmakers of the American Dream, 7. 289 Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, Yes, Yes, Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade, (Cambridge, MA: DeCapo Press, 2002), 3. 290 Fricke and Ahearn, Yes, Yes, Y’all, 342.
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with more exhibit space. The exhibits explained the value of free press and the press’ role in important events.
Imagine, on the opportunities and resources for academically talented youth, stated that the primary goal of museums was to serve as repositories. Originally, museum collections displayed artifacts one by one with display panels on walls and pursued limited educational goals. The article argued that museums had evolved and developed ambitious educational programs.291 “Interactive museum sites differ greatly, depending on each museum’s intent and design. But their general purpose is to provide participatory opportunities that are shaped by the visitors’ own curiosity and by their intellectual and even emotional responses.”292
The emphasis on fun and pleasure in popular culture museums helped other types of museums to become more visitor friendly, playful places. The American History Museum transformed during the two years it was closed because a commission appointed by the museum stated that it was “incoherent and disorganized, and ‘lacking aesthetic appeal’ and balance.”293
When it reopened in 2008 it had a rotation of a thousand American songs playing in the entrance,
“artifact walls” with five hundred objects to give visitors a sense of what was collected, a gallery of documents, welcome center, two new gift shops, and two cafes. The Smithsonian even hosted the world premiere of “Night at the Museum,” which was set inside the museum, something it had never done before.294
This thesis examined how the development of popular culture museums happened as private individuals and organizations wanted to display their collections in a public forum. This
291 “The Evolution of the Contemporary Museum,” Imagine (November/December 1996): 12. 292 “The Evolution of the Contemporary Museum,” 12. 293 “America’s Attic Is Ready for Its Public; With Orders to Get Organized and More Relevant, The American History Museum Reinvents Itself,” New York Times, 20 November 2008. 294 “On Mall, a Sight at the Museum; Stars Come Out for ‘Smithsonian’ Film Premiere,” New York Times, 15 May 2009.
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thesis argued that as more popular culture museums opened they transformed from being primarily object focused to telling a story, at the same time as museums and popular culture studies fields professionalized. In addition, professionalization of the museum field and professionalization of the popular culture field happened simultaneously. Ultimately, this thesis presented an understanding of how popular culture museums surfaced through an analysis of early, middle, and current popular culture museums.
This thesis could help public historians by illustrating that transformations could revitalize the content for visitors. It also teaches public historians that popular culture museums unique institutions that were worthy of specialized study because they were part history museum, part art museum, part science center, part shrine. The opening of popular culture museums helped validate the field of popular culture, and the academic study of popular culture provided the basis for interpretation. There are no other surveys of popular culture museums like this thesis but there were a few articles that analyze particular popular culture museums. Further research needs to be done. While doing further research, employees at popular culture museums should be surveyed about what their needs are. The employees should also be asked about how their museum practices could help other museum professionals so other museums could draw on what they had done to appeal to visitors. It should include popular culture museums that failed and the reasons why. It should also analyze popular culture museums together as a whole in order to identify the similarities and differences of successful and failed museums to discover what made them so. The results should be compared to standard history museums in order to see what could be learned from each other.
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