1999-03-19
SPEECH LOG
Mark E. Kuczewski, Ph.D., and Cynthia A. Brincat, Ph.D., of the Center for the Study of Bioethics, Medical College of Wisconsin, spoke on "Strangers in a Strange Land: Philosophy and Applied Ethics," as part of the 1998-1999 Colloquium Series, Department of Philosophy, Marquette University.
READING NOTEBOOK
Curators, like historian, strive for objectivity, but they have to select and simplify far more drastically than in a book, and the resulting subjectivity is obscured by the authenticity of the objects and the lure of the design in which they have been placed. Because an exhibition's interpretation thus pronounced carries such power, it can provoke surprisingly violent protests from those who find it unfair that they cannot present a conflicting interpretation with similar authority. The thesis of a book can be answered with another book but how do you answer an exhibition? We have already witnessed the angry outcry against the original Enola Gay/Hiroshima exhibition at the Smithsonian. The Freud exhibition at the Library of Congress drew a storm of protests from anti-Freudians from the moment the plans for it were announced.
--Edmund S. Morgan, "Mr. W. on Show,"
New York Review of Books, Vol. XLVI, No. 4, March 4, 1999, p. 25.
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