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Biomedicine in museums

Museum exhibition comments on blog post

By February 17, 2009No Comments

Media people say that the essence of news is that ‘Dog bites postman’ never makes it to the headlines, while ‘Postman bites dog’ does. So here is a news item from the blog world:

Like other museum blogs, this one (and its Danish sibling) writes comments about exhibitions — either about our own shows or those of other museums. However, I’ve never seen the reverse, i.e., an exhibition that discusses a blog post.

Until now, that is! The new exhibition ‘Kroppen/Usynlig verden‘ (The Body/Invisible World), which opened at the Norwegian Technical Museum in Oslo a few weeks ago, discusses, among other things, the new trend of organising biomedical image competitions (like the Wellcome Image Award). In this connection the exhibition quotes an earlier post (‘Biomedical image fatigue’) from this humble blog:

The top of the biomedical image pops? Or what? Am I the only person who is beginning to feel saturated with biomedical images? Not only is this culture as a whole swamped with pictures—on billboards, in newspapers, on websítes and blogs, not to speak of the pictorial explosions on Youtube and Flickr. The professional biomedical media are also rapidly becoming heavily visualized. Every life science journal with self-respect puts eye-popping bio-pictures on its covers; and the articles between the covers are filled with micrographs and visualizations. The popular science media are no exception: amazing picture of dendrites, ribosomes and embryos everywhere. […] Instead of being bombarded with albums of beautiful pics, I would like to see more aesthetic assessment. Instead of just displaying their choice, the jurors should come out of the aesthetic closet and pass some outspoken critical judgement. Give us some arguments pro and contra the chosen image. What makes this select image a good picture?

Haven’t seen it myself yet. But Ellen Lange (one of the curators of the Oslo exhibition) kindly noticed me. Feels like an endorsement.

Thomas Söderqvist

Author Thomas Söderqvist

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