One reason to visit a museum is to see visually-compelling things, whether they’re beautiful or just strange. But even museums well-stocked with fascinating things have cases, walls, even entire rooms full of what I’m going to call “little sh*ts” – fragmentary figurines, a heap of pottery shards, manuscripts without pictures in a language you don’t understand – visually boring things that you walk past without pausing. Now, I played at a semi-pro level in the little sh*ts game for several years, so I know that even little sh*ts can be fascinating, but only if you’re given enough information about them. Give me a pottery shard, and I’ll give you a history of trade routes, eating habits, funerary ritual, and so on and so on until you have to distract me (hint: say something like “is it happy hour yet?”).
But for little sh*ts to be even remotely interesting, there has to be interesting information available, and that is just not the case in the Institute of the Arab World. This place is chock-a-block with little sh*ts, and is such an informational desert that I started humming the theme song from A Fistful of Dollars. Case after case of manuscripts labeled only with their name in Arabic, fragments of architectural decoration without any indication of what type of building they came from, little pieces of fabrics – from clothes? furnishings? Who knows?
I didn’t go to the special exhibition, so I’ll update if all of the museum’s visually compelling works are hiding in there… but until then, go to the Louvre if you want to see more than the little sh*ts of the Arab world.
