Steve Asma has seen a lot, but he’d never seen a translucent rat until his brother gave him one for his birthday. It floats in a jar of formaldehyde, twisted awkwardly, as if its back were broken. You can see through the skin and muscles. Its bones have somehow been dyed red, so that a rodent skeleton looms in ghostly outline beneath the tissues. “The rib cage and spine and feet and hands are articulated very clearly,” says Asma, who doesn’t like the rodent much. “The skull is bloodred.”
One way for a museum to provide a context, of course, is just to say what a specimen is supposed to be. Stick a label on the rat’s jar. That’s what most museums do most of the time: they provide “a plaque, a chart or a recording that announces to you–even before a question can be formulated in your head–‘What you are seeing is thus and so.’” We tend to think that if we aren’t reading labels, we aren’t learning. Asma agrees that museums should be instructive, but the argument of his book is that if they aren’t places of inspiration first, they’ll lose most of their audience.
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The developers of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum’s “Butterfly Haven” exhibit were evidently thinking along these same lines. When Asma and I visited the exhibit we entered a small anteroom where a video advised us not to grab or scare the butterflies. We pushed through the swinging doors and a barrier of rushing air, and found ourselves in a breezy, skylit space roughly the size and height of a basketball court, its ceiling and south and west walls all glass.
There were no signs, no hovering escorts, no explanations of any kind–and nothing obvious for us to do. The butterfly haven isn’t “interactive” in the usual museum sense. Asma appreciatively contrasted it with the “robotic stuff” that dominates many exhibits these days. “Kids run up and pull the lever or whatever, then they run off,” he said. “Here you have to put your own ego aside and absorb things for a while.”
The butterfly haven puts butterflies in a context where we see them as strange, wonderful, glittering beings. It’s not especially realistic–those aren’t real birds–and I’m not sure that it succeeds in making people want to know more. But it’s inspiring and memorable.
Ken Yellis suspects that museum exhibits are the least studied of all major media. Asma agrees. He writes, “Museums are saying more than we have previously noticed,” and he’s fascinated by the way they offer “three-dimensional windows into the world of ideas.”
For the same reason, Cuvier was reluctant to lay much emphasis on specimens that were abnormal in some way, such as a two-headed calf. Hunter had no such inhibitions. He collected and classified and displayed more than 3,000 “monsters.” According to Asma, “Cabinets were assigned for monsters due to ‘Abnormal Situation of Parts,’ for those resulting from ‘Addition of Parts,’ for those resulting from ‘Deficiency of Parts,’ and so on.” More useful context would have to await the discovery of genetics.
