102. Copies in Museums
Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.
On Berlin’s Museum Island, four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum. Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE in Samʼal (Zincirli) in southern Turkey. And one is a plaster copy made a little over 100 years ago.
Pergamon Museum curator Pinar Durgun has heard a range of negative visitor reactions to this copy — from disappointment to feeling tricked — and engages visitors to think more deeply about copies. As an archeologist and art historian, Durgun is fascinated by the cultural attitude and history of copies: the stories they tell about their creators’ values, how they can be used to keep original objects in situ, and their role in repatriation or restitution cases.
In this episode, Durgun describes the ways that museum visitors’ perception of authenticity has changed over time, how replicas jump-started museum collections in the late 19th-century, and some of the ethical implications of copies in museums.
Gallery Continues 🎒
Durgun speculates that museum visitors might increasingly feel an “anxiety around things not being authentic and original” as a result of technological changes like easier-to-make deepfakes. Last year, Museum Archipelago featured a story about an exhibit called Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image that made a convincing fake speech by Richard Nixon describing a disaster during the Apollo 11 moon mission.
In this episode, artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund discuss how they created the deepfake as a way to highlight various misinformation techniques, the changing literacy of the general public towards media manipulation, and the effectiveness of misinformation in the museum medium.
Archipelago at the Movies🍿The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
The gallery attendant working the Impressionist Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1999's The Thomas Crown Affair is hands down the most competent museum security of any film we've reviewed on Archipelago at the Movies. But even he is no match for the titular Crown, a wealthy business boy bored by everything except stealing priceless paintings and Catherine Banning, the alluring insurance investigator sent to investigate the heist.
Today on Archipelago at the Movies, journalist (and her own person) Ashira Morris and I discuss the very sexy Thomas Crown Affair, correct some inaccuracies by a museum docent, and try to figure out what was going on with 90s diet smoothie culture.