Museums and the Hunt for ‘Real Culture’ on the Road

In a recent post over at BootsnAll, Roger Wade explains why he believes museums are overrated. “If you think about it, with only a few exceptions, museums are all history museums one way or another,” he writes.

The most famous ones display stationary art that only the elite classes could ever hope to own or even see. Sure, some of them tell the stories of what life was really like at the time, but many of them are idealized versions or nothing like reality at all ... History certainly has its place, but when you visit Madrid today might it not be more interesting to see some intricacies of modern big city Spanish life than what a lone artist a few hundred years ago was thinking?

Later, after offering some museum alternatives—grocery stores and the like—he adds: “You’ll learn far more about their real culture of today in a place like this than you would at the famous museum…”

Now, I’m a big fan of foreign supermarkets. But I’m also a bona fide history geek, and as such I’m worried about what seems to be an increasingly popular theme in travel advice these days: the idea that museums, and history more generally, are somehow distinct or cut off from a destination’s true culture. Does anyone really think that a visit to the Terror House won’t improve their understanding of post-Soviet Budapest? Or that the Transit Museum doesn’t shed some light on the way New Yorkers live? And I know, I know, we’ve all had Madonna-and-Child art gallery overload at some point—but trying to understand the Catholic world without taking a look at its most powerful iconography seems crazy to me.

Go ahead, call me a geek, but I’ll balance out a good people-watching session with some museum time any day. And I just don’t see how the one is more “real” than the other.

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