A message just came through on one of my museum list servs.  Earlier this week, Oprah had the director of the National Museum of American History.  He brought a few choice artifacts with him, including Dorothy's ruby slippers.  And after he carefully explained how the shoes were deteriorating and told her not to touch them, she picked them up and waved them around.  Read a complete transcript with pictures here.
What I find most fascinating is the link to the message boards for Oprah.com.  Everyone seemed universally horrified that Oprah did this--and they don't even appear to be museum nerds!  I think the power of the real just addled her brain--good grief.

It reminds me of an incident at a previous place of employment.  Some major financial donors were brought back to the collections area to see some of the treasures (I was an intern at the time).  We did not give them gloves and explained why they could not touch.  But they were overcome with excitement,  especially regarding one of Edith Head's (costume designer--she won 9 Oscars!) Academy Awards.  And before we knew it, the director gave permission and they were putting on gloves and passing around the Oscar.  Granted, there wasn't too much damage they could do to the Oscar, but now that they had gloves they started touching other things--things they could do real damage to.  And there were more of them than of us and we just couldn't keep an eye on everything.  It was chaos!  And we were all in a panic!  No tragedies occurred, but we were all freaking out.  And the director (not from the museum world, but the business world) didn't understand our concern:  "But they gave us a lot of money.  We can't say no."  Sigh.  Money and celebrity do not make one immune to the fact that you can destroy things.  And apparently Oprah set a horrific example. Shame on her!

We don't have that problem here, thank goodness.

Tags: other museums