Sunday, July 31, 2005

LACMA's King Tut

I went to the King Tut exhibit yesterday. I enjoyed seeing it, but it was way too crowded. It took a long time to get through the exhibit because there were so many people in such a small space. I wondered why they set it up the way that they did. For example at the beginning there was a sort of lead in area with no objects other than one photograph per wall and a sentence on each about Howard Carter. This was interesting information, but perhaps it is a different subject than that of the objects themselves? There was also another room darkened to show a short video, which seemed to be nothing more than an introduction to what we were about to see. There was a least one other room like this with a map and a photograph, neither of which I could see very well, due to the darkness and all of the people. A lot of the exhibit happened to be in very dark rooms. I felt overall that someone was trying to control my experience in a theatrical way. It was also as if there were at least three different centers of focus: the archeological experience, Egyptian mythology, and, speculation on what King Tut may actually have looked like and how he died.

1 comment:

Katherine Kean said...

You may be in luck, this exhibit does move on after Los Angeles. I read that it will be at Chicago’s Field Museum in May 2006, just in case you are still in the Chicago area.

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