The Dominance of Aesthetics

I came across this following passage Jean Nouvel put forward at the First International Symposium on Zoo Design and Construction held at the Paigton Zoo, Devon England in 1975.

"The exhibition of wild animals in captivity must always follow the rules of aesthetics, that is to say that the visitor must all the time feel himself to be in pleasant surroundings.

To obey this rule, the method of exhibition must follow the taste of the period, and the thoughts which the animals being shown arouse in the mind of the visitor."

Known for his preoccupation with architectural theatrics, it could be said that this way of thinking has been carried on in his works, right through to the The Musée du quai Branly which has received heavy criticism for a perceived reliance in its exhibitions on visual appeal and theatrics, as opposed to explanation and context.


Bernice Murphy, co-founder of the Sydney MCA and now National Director of Museums Australia and Chair of the Ethics Committee of the International Council of Museums. She told a Sydney symposium on 'Australian Arts in an International Context' that she found the whole of Quai Branly to be a "regressive museology" and the presentation of Aboriginal art "in a vegetal environment" to be "an exotic mise en scène" in the worst taste.

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN of the New York Times:

"If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and arranged with hardly any discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. Colonialism of a bygone era is replaced by a whole new French brand of condescension."

"Think of the museum as a kind of ghetto for the "other," a word Mr. Chirac has taken to using: an enormous, rambling, crepuscular cavern that tries to evoke a journey into the jungle, downriver, where suddenly scary masks or totem poles loom out of the darkness and everything is meant to be foreign and exotic. The Crayola-colored facade and its garden set the stage for this passage from civilization."

I went the museum myself in 2009.(above photos are my own) Admittedly it did come across as a bit on the nose like Kimmelman had mentioned, right from the moment you enter where you see the elevated UFO like museum looming over a barren landscape setting. It's hard not to read into such an arrangement but then again I think it should be taken into consideration that I definitely sit on the more " prone to being difficult" end in the spectrum of cultural sensitivity.

There were some exciting sequence of spaces inside the museum, which was a stark and refreshing contrast of the clean sober spaces of the many more conventional museum spaces in Paris. I think it should be commended in its attempt to use space to add to the narrative of the housed collection. I think it's a great concept, the problem is in the clumsily heavy handed execution. The sequence of spaces is compounded with jarring effects and it got a bit chaotic and distracted from the exhibits. The lasting impression was that of style over substance.