How beer and archaeological museums are the same.

Most kids don't like the taste of beer.  You start drinking it because you are a teenager and others are doing it and you don't want to seem like an idiot or philistine or narrow-minded.  Eventually, you either have the strength of identity to say "I don't like alcohol" or you learn to appreciate it through sheer repetition, and then maybe move on to discriminating between different kinds of beer.

The process for many people of learning to appreciate museums is the same.  You know you are supposed to like them, but you don't really know how or why.  If you travel as an older teen, you go, you look, and you wonder quietly to yourself what all the fuss is about, but you never say anything because you know it will only demonstrate how young and uncultured you are.  Eventually, if you are lucky, you learn to appreciate them through sheer repetition, and then perhaps you can begin to discriminate between different kinds of art. Museums don't help you learn to appreciate them, especially the ones that Phil calls "museums by experts for experts" which is a perfect description for many (but not all) museums in Greece. Many are made by archaeologists for other archaeologists.  The text doesn't help, as what is on the walls is often too in-depth, and what is near the artifacts is often bewildering, using too much esoteric classification by shape and chronological terminology. You need a lot of background to understand the significance of the fragments.  I never quite got enough background to understand what I'm being shown, even with all the experience I have.  Nevertheless, I have learned to enjoy the museums.  I've "conquered" them the way I conquered beer.

I have been watching my students skim through museums, not really knowing what they are looking at and often getting tired (it seems) of trying to figure it out.  They buzz through quickly.  It made me look at myself, not that different than them in terms of intrinsic interest, but with a lot more patience.  I realized that I've developed a series of strategies for going to museums that helps me to really enjoy them. If a museum has good signage, which I define as taking the typical viewer's experience and knowledge into account (i.e. starting from the beginning) I might read considerable amounts, basically giving the museum curator a chance to teach me something.  I'm willing to "go with."  If it isn't good signage, I might try a couple of different strategies.  One is to focus in on something I am already familiar with -- a particular era, or any mention of a post-ancient history, or a functional approach (what was the stuff USED for?).  Or I might try to learn from an expert, and tag along with Phil and listen to the questions he is asking and the comments he makes.  A third is to just "float" along and let my eye catch anything of interest, and then follow that thread, thinking about what I am looking at or enjoying the aesthetics.  Basically I can free myself from trying to follow the argument of the museum and not worry about observing everything or making sense of it, but just follow my own gaze.  A fourth is to critique the museum; to try to analyze its argument, and then think about why it is or is not working.  At Colonna, I used a mix of all the strategies and had a wonderful time.  

Strategy 1:  Outside were some mosaics from the floor of the Jewish synagogue. I've looked a lot of Jewish sites in multiple countries, so this was interesting to compare.

Detail from the mosaic.... beautiful!

Strategy 2:  observing the archaeologist at work.  It was a 3D photo that required the use of a pair of movie-theater 3D glasses!

The rest are strategy 3:  floating and finding whatever strikes my fancy or curiosity.
A model of a huge ancient building.  It had two stories and a balcony.  I realized I hadn't seen much domestic housing reconstructed and had no idea they had the technology to build something this big and modern-looking.

A pottery kiln.  Again, I was struck by how well-created it was for something so old. Those pots came out of a kiln like this?

But what about a pot this size?  It was about 5 feet tall!

I moved then to details on the pottery that I particularly liked.  This guy looked like he was walking like an Egyptian, or a modern parody:

Flower shape

Stampy Longnose, I think. Such character in that face!

Love these birds.  I think I could draw this.

I thought this captured something about love.  One hand is holding another, and a third is offering something.

Strategy 4 doesn't really show up in images, but I realized that the museum is one of those older museums "by experts for experts." It had no information about the site after its Greek past, though I knew that it had been in better shape than it was now even in the 19th century and had been partially dismantled by my hero, Samuel Gridley Howe.