Golden Opportunities Missed at AMNH’s Gold Show

Mixtec Bell, Mexico, c. 1200-1521
The show was so nice, I’ll say it twice: I adored “Gold” at the American Museum of Natural History. It came across like your best 8th-grade science and social studies teachers combined—plying you with fun facts; dazzling you with fascinating illustrative materials (huge, fancifully shaped gold nuggets, gold ingots, gold jewelry, Beyoncé’s gold Grammy, and, let us not forget, the gold penis shield); and illuminating, in the liveliest possible way, everything you could possibly want to know about this versatile mineral. On top of all that, the curators found creative ways to tangibly illustrate gold’s unique properties—from a 12-by-12-by-8-foot room entirely lined with just three ounces of gold leaf (to demonstrate the metal’s malleability) to a scale that informs you how much you’d be worth if your weight were in gold instead of mere flesh and blood.
So why am I mildly disgruntled? When I got to the museum shop (brandishing the wrong metal—a platinum credit card), I found that although I could buy all manner of gilded geegaws, there was no catalogue for this show. I had wanted to bring all those chunks of gold and knowledge home with me in one sumptuously illustrated volume. But all the the shop clerk could offer me was a lackluster “companion book,” bearing no specific connection to the show. The best “catalogue” turns out to be the extremely rich website for the show.
The strong publishing program that I’ve come to take for granted at major art museums is missing from the AMNH: Steve Reichl, the museum’s director of media relations, told me that producing catalogues, which had been tried for a few previous major shows, had proven to be “too much work and not worth it. We’re not set up for it.” Maybe they should pick the brains of the publications department at that big art museum across Central Park.
And while they’re at it, AMNH should sometimes try to borrow some objects from the Metropolitan Museum’s extensive collections. The historic gold artifacts from around the world that are displayed in the AMNH’s exhibition are mostly drawn from that museum’s extensive collection—appealing but not of the uniformly exceptional artistic quality that is standard at the Met.
Better yet, New York museums should go a step further and consider coordinating major exhibition projects. Several institutions in the Berkshires are doing just that, in jointly planning next summer’s Season of Dutch Arts.
I have previously mentioned how desirable it might have been for the Museum of Modern Art and the Met to have presented “Dada” and “Glitter and Doom” simultaneously, to allow the public to compare two very different takes on the same historical period.
Similarly, what if several New York City museums had simultaneously mined their golden riches to enrich their audiences? Admittedly, this might require a more cooperative spirit than this big city’s highly competitive cultural institutions usually manage to muster. But the synergistic rewards might be well worth the effort.
Maybe they can get together to explore the theme of AMNH’s next show in what seems to be its continuing series devoted to the material used for jewelry (diamonds, amber and pearls, thus far). What’s likely to be next? (CultureGrrl consults her jewelry box.)
Silver!