<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>Hi Lawrence and others, it seems a much simpler and basic precedent and analogy seems to be overlooked here: Roman gladiator spectacles, delectation and frisson for the privileged and circus for the masses to appease them. By raising their thumbs or not they have the illusion that they have control over something.<br><br></div>Instead of meeting people's needs, creating spectacles where someone else is suffering more than they do-- momentarily being at a safe place (in the galleries of the Coliseum or in front of TV) while someone else is buffeted with mortal peril.<br><br></div>Ciao,<br></div>Murat<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 8:40 AM, Lawrence-Minh Davis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:lawrence.minh.davis@gmail.com" target="_blank">lawrence.minh.davis@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial">Why <i>Westworld</i>? Because I work at the Smithsonian, and <i>Westworld</i> feels all about museums to me.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial">We get a theme park in Westworld that epitomizes the interactive, “user experience”-centric model of encountering history so prevalent in museums today. Helpfully we get to see the park from the participant and the design end of things (the management end, too). Added bonus that <i>Westworld</i> twins the wonder of museums and the violence that always inheres in that wonder—the violence the traditional museum endeavors to hide, or at least normalize. I mean representational violence, I mean epistemic violence, and, of course, I mean real-time physical violence. Museums need them all.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial">Westworld the park makes no effort to pretend to be a faithful recounting of history. Nor is it even showing us how history is made, wink wink</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial">. Westworld’s Old West is a ritual, a flashy means of codifying relations, reenacting or recreating an imagined past that is, of course, present and future as well. Meaning it is playing out collective desires, most immediately for white male power, that are not at all past, never past, but present, and in tension, therefore in need of continual rehearsal so that they might carry into the future. This is pretty much how our museums work too.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial">Complicating matters in <i>Westworld</i> are the hosts, historical props who are not static but living, and feeling, and inconveniently fucking up the ritual, not all happy to keep playing out the collective desires of park visitors and designers.</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial">Museums of today don’t have hosts…well, see the recent scandal at the 2017 American Alliance of Museums Expo, when the museum vendor LifeFormations exhibited a true-to-scale diorama of a white man selling an enslaved black man on an auction block. The mannequins didn’t revolt, but, surprise surprise, expo-goers of color did (side note: the theme of this year’s expo was “Diversity, Equity, Accessibility: Inclusion in Museums”!)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px;background-image:initial;background-size:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;background-position:initial;background-repeat:initial"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px;background-image:initial;background-size:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;background-position:initial;background-repeat:initial"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial">The message across spaces is pretty clear: you can’t stage human bodies as props, or rather you can, but get ready for violent blowback.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px;background-image:initial;background-size:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;background-position:initial;background-repeat:initial"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px;background-image:initial;background-size:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;background-position:initial;background-repeat:initial"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial">In the museum world as in <i>Westworld</i> we're asking who gets the power to tell stories, and the answer is never simple, even as more people from marginalized communities make their way up museum hierarchies.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px;background-image:initial;background-size:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;background-position:initial;background-repeat:initial"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:12.8px;background-image:initial;background-size:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;background-position:initial;background-repeat:initial"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial">Watching the show I feel this deep sympathy for Bernard, who as park engineer is a kind of curator, trying with conviction and bewilderment at once to balance his various imperatives and impulses, trying to be ethical and good at his job while figuring out on the fly his limitations, his shifting allegiances, his own shifting identity, his relative privilege and power, his complicity—feelings I certainly experience, and I would guess pretty much all curators of color experience to some degree or another. Like Bernard, we get the shock of getting put in our place sometimes. But we're also in a time of revolt, and our own season 2 is coming.</span></p><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="m_8332461096260811767gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr">Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, PhD<div>Curator, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center</div><div>Editor, The Asian American Literary Review</div><div>Adjunct Faculty, University of Maryland Asian American Studies Program</div><div><a href="tel:(443)%20878-3796" value="+14438783796" target="_blank">(443) 878-3796</a></div></div></div></div></div>
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