WHERE WHAT’S DONE COMES UNDONE (IS A MUSEUM) BY EZRA SHALES

EZRA SHALES

WHERE WHAT’S DONE COMES UNDONE (IS A MUSEUM)

This reading by Ezra Shales, an art historian, curator and artists talks about museums and the need that people have to be able to interact with the art and talk about it and not just walk around it with caution in silence. But not every place is like this, she talks about how other artists and museums have integrated that “hands-on” principle, they have broken away from making a museum a mausoleum. As the author states, “Touching things is important to access them but also to sense the way that some things are impregnable, that materials hold their own riddles worth pondering when they cannot be solved.”

Her very first museum she went to was her upstairs neighbors who lived on the 8^th floor of her parents apartment. She was so fascinated to see so much culture in one place and to be able to touch it, she refers back to her grandma's china set lifelessly behind a glass cabinet, the only thing separating her from being able to touch it was a key. And how with just looking at something we don't really get to learn from the artifact's form or from where it came from. And what about a piece that has worn with age or it was flawed? When touching it many more questions pop up, was it intentional or did it happen over time... countless of questions one may think of when being able to hold an artifact and not just walk past it in its glass shield inside a quiet museum.