The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/museums/)
On Oct. 5, 2021, Prof. Corrie Moreau, ecology and evolutionary biology, published a correspondence explaining why funding natural history museums are a better method of extinction prevention than de-extinction projects.
Several museums in Ithaca have shifted exhibits online, as they are categorized as non-essential businesses and forced to stop physical operation.
While everyone’s lining up with their $22 timed tickets to see the Cezanne & Beyond show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, look instead at the museum’s much-smaller but equally interesting exhibition Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Durer and Titian. The Cezanne-viewers will be bottlenecked through low-ceilinged rooms and bumping elbows as they listen to their audio tours, but you, enlightened visitor, will be strolling through the relatively empty galleries of Monumental Prints, gazing at astounding Renaissance engravings and etchings.
Over break I visited friends in New York City, where I had previously lived for five years. During that time I rarely schlepped out to Queens from my Brooklyn apartment — with one big exception: the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Museum summer parties. This time, I decided to take in the museum sans hipster-packed, alcohol-sopped outdoor rave. This trip made me wonder, though, whether beer-goggles were needed to appreciate the often vapid beauty — or more often, politicized disparagement of beauty — that crowds the contemporary art scene.
This past week, my boyfriend visited me during Cornell’s spring break, and so I celebrated as if it were mine, too (SPRING BREAK 2009!).
Maybe it wasn’t as buckwild as Cancún would have been, but we did do a lot of touristy things, as one might expect. The most shocking and disappointing realization to come of these was that the Louvre kind of sucks. Like, really.