The Museum of Hyrule
Dec. 13th, 2022 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingBack in November, when I posted (this comic) on Tumblr, I wrote an essay to accompany it on my personal website, where I generally allow myself to have longer artist’s statements instead of short captions. This statement was way too long, so I scrapped it. Maybe it would be a decent way of explaining my distaste for fine art, though.
TLDR: I hate museums.
I was recently thinking about what a modern version of Hyrule would look like, and I was imagining how fun it would be for Link to encounter the Master Sword during a class trip to a museum. When I started sketching, however, what I ended up drawing is a reincarnation of Ganon seeing his crown from Ocarina of Time. The moment I wanted to capture is the calm immediately before a terrible storm.
Also, as someone who loves art and history, I tend to dislike museums.
This distaste struck me like a physical blow during a recent visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I’ve started studying castle architecture, and I was excited about visiting the museum’s collection of medieval religious art from various cultures along the Silk Road, which I remembered being extremely interesting.
What I found instead was gallery after gallery of oil portraits of Europeans and Americans with European ancestry. That’s fine, I guess; but, given that Philadelphia has been home to a vibrant African-American culture since it was first founded, this came as something of a surprise. My home museum as a college student, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, has an amazing collection of fine art and folk art created by African and African-American artists, so I was surprised to see that the Philadelphia Museum of Art only had a few pieces from contemporary African-American artists in a temporary exhibition in the basement.
Even worse, in the colonial American art gallery, there was a ton of silver tableware and fancy painted plates and antique furniture, but there was nothing created by Native Americans. Literally nothing. Instead, there was a small sign on a bare wall down the corridor outside of the gallery that said something to the effect of, “We respect the cultural heritage of indigenous American peoples, but all their stuff is in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.” Because it’s not “art,” I guess. Fuck that. Fuck that and fuck everyone involved. I don’t have any particular personal connection to the people who lived on this land alongside the early European settlers, but just from my standpoint of basic interest and curiosity – this division between “art” and “archaeology” is bullshit.
Rewind to me being a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, where I took a graduate seminar with a famous art historian specializing in Japanese prints. A large portion of the class was devoted to surimono prints, which are privately commissioned pieces with tiny prints runs but extremely high print quality. Because the print runs were so small, and because this art was generally created either early-career artists or famous artists using a pseudonym, it can be difficult to figure out what a surimono print was and where it came from.
One of our class assignments was to take a grainy photocopy of a reproduction of a surimono print and figure out who the artist was, what year it was printed, and who commissioned it. I spent at least two dozen hours in the Fisher Fine Arts Library combing through book after book after book while trying to decipher the messy Edo-period Japanese calligraphy as reproduced on the shitty photocopy, and it was only after reaching out to a few friends in Japan that I was able to get any leads.
The process of doing this research made me realize that surimono prints were a lot like the dōjinshi (self-published) comics I was studying for my dissertation, not to mention the dōjinshi chapbooks published by poetry circles and college literary clubs that I’d studied while doing a year of language training in Tokyo. What I proposed for my final paper for the art history seminar was a discussion of research strategies concerning the origins and provenance of dōjinshi, which are not only invaluable to the study of Japanese literature and comics, but also beautifully produced physical objects that could easily be considered as modern-day surimono.
The famous art historian professor turned me down flat. Comics are not “art,” she said.
Toward the end of the semester, our class went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to look at its archival collection of Japanese woodblock prints. They were meticulously preserved and gorgeously presented, and a lot of them looked like garbage. What I mean is that their material quality made it clear that they were mass-produced on cheap paper with sloppy workmanship during later print runs in which the blocks used to print them had been worn and damaged from use. Also, from both a technical and a creative perspective, the art itself wasn’t great.
While watching grown-ass adults with PhDs fawn over dirty pieces of paper with cloth gloves and padded tweezers, I realized what “art” was: Art is something that can be bought and sold for large sums of money. In other words, “art” is not creative expression that sparks joy and shines light onto living human traditions; rather, it’s an investment that should ideally be stored in an inaccessible archive until it can be liquidated as a resource and used to acquire more valuable investments. Again, fuck that.
The raw sewage icing on this festering fecal cake is that museums use the resources they amass in order to acquire stolen and looted “art” and “archaeological artifacts” specifically for the purpose of putting them in archival storage.
When I lived in Washington DC, a good friend of mine from college was working at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which had just opened in 2016. I sent him a few of my students from George Mason University as interns, and every so often we’d go out for lunch to catch up and gossip.
On one particularly memorable occasion, our gossip turned into venting, and my friend delivered a truly epic monologue on the state of the Smithsonian’s archives. Essentially, they have a ton of cultural heritage that doesn’t belong to them – including actual literal human remains – that they hide underground so that nobody knows it’s there and comes around asking for them to give it back.
Don’t get me wrong – the Smithsonian is fairly progressive as far as national museums go, and many members of their staff are doing good and important work to ensure that things change for the better. Still, hiding stolen art and artifacts in underground archives is something that all museums do. What the actual fuck. I mean, keeping human remains in a cardboard box on an Ikea shelf because they have a high monetary value on the art market? Jesus Christ.
So, back in 2016, I wrote a fanfic novella called “The Museum of Hyrule” that dramatizes these issues through the character of Ganondorf, who is a museum curator in a modern version of Hyrule. The writing feels a bit cringe to me now, so I’m not going to link to the story, but I think it was an interesting concept. Unfortunately, writing something that political for such an active and high-profile fandom made me a target of anti-fandom harassment. One of the more unhinged comments I got was an anonymous person on Tumblr encouraging me to get raped and die of AIDS if I liked Black dick so much. Charming, right? The harassment I received for “sympathizing with a problematic character” became even more intense following the 2016 election, so I learned to keep my head down.
Still, it’s difficult to pretend like I don’t care about the way culture is valued according to its monetary equivalence on an international market of the ultra-wealthy. I care a lot about how museums resist opening their space to the sort of creative expression that resonates with enormous audiences across international borders on social media, and I care a lot about how museum instead dedicate that space to historic works of art that they refuse to return to their rightful caregivers. In fact, that sort of aggressively insensitive and deliberate fuckery makes me furious.
As both concrete buildings and abstract concepts, museums serve as walls that separate people from culture while also using the standards of ultra-wealthy collectors to suppress emergent creative communities. I am not the first or only person to say this, because it’s true. This is not a philosophical conundrum, but something that affects many people on a deep personal level.
As I wrote at the beginning of this essay, I thought it would be an interesting to draw Link going to a museum on a class trip and seeing the Master Sword in a display case. A comic depiction of an Anglo-coded person going to a museum and finding that the European heritage on display resonates with him would get a ton of positive feedback on social media, especially within the Legend of Zelda fandom. Of course it would. But that’s not what I wanted to draw, it turns out.
What I wanted to draw was the moment immediately before The Evil Ganon ™ comes to the realization about museums that took me years to develop, namely: These institutions should be destroyed.
“But Kathryn,” you might be saying. “Maybe you’re being a little extreme about museums, but that sounds like it would be a fascinating story! Why do you have to write about this in terms of Legend of Zelda characters? Couldn’t you create something original?”
And I am telling you: It is precisely because of the way that “art” is commodified and valued as an investment that the best and truest stories I can tell will never be published in traditional venues. My stories are too fantastic to be “literary fiction” but not conventional enough to be “genre fiction,” and I’m disgusted by the idea of commodifying my own identity just to sell my stories. I’m trying to find a place for my work anyway, but the professional publishing market is competitive to a such an incredible degree that it’s impossible to explain to anyone who isn’t directly involved.
And also, I am telling you: It is precisely because of the way that “art” is commodified and valued as an investment that anyone would think that modern mythology is not appropriate vehicle to use to tell a story that resonates through its archetypes and allusions.
TLDR: I hate museums.
I was recently thinking about what a modern version of Hyrule would look like, and I was imagining how fun it would be for Link to encounter the Master Sword during a class trip to a museum. When I started sketching, however, what I ended up drawing is a reincarnation of Ganon seeing his crown from Ocarina of Time. The moment I wanted to capture is the calm immediately before a terrible storm.
Also, as someone who loves art and history, I tend to dislike museums.
This distaste struck me like a physical blow during a recent visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I’ve started studying castle architecture, and I was excited about visiting the museum’s collection of medieval religious art from various cultures along the Silk Road, which I remembered being extremely interesting.
What I found instead was gallery after gallery of oil portraits of Europeans and Americans with European ancestry. That’s fine, I guess; but, given that Philadelphia has been home to a vibrant African-American culture since it was first founded, this came as something of a surprise. My home museum as a college student, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, has an amazing collection of fine art and folk art created by African and African-American artists, so I was surprised to see that the Philadelphia Museum of Art only had a few pieces from contemporary African-American artists in a temporary exhibition in the basement.
Even worse, in the colonial American art gallery, there was a ton of silver tableware and fancy painted plates and antique furniture, but there was nothing created by Native Americans. Literally nothing. Instead, there was a small sign on a bare wall down the corridor outside of the gallery that said something to the effect of, “We respect the cultural heritage of indigenous American peoples, but all their stuff is in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.” Because it’s not “art,” I guess. Fuck that. Fuck that and fuck everyone involved. I don’t have any particular personal connection to the people who lived on this land alongside the early European settlers, but just from my standpoint of basic interest and curiosity – this division between “art” and “archaeology” is bullshit.
Rewind to me being a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, where I took a graduate seminar with a famous art historian specializing in Japanese prints. A large portion of the class was devoted to surimono prints, which are privately commissioned pieces with tiny prints runs but extremely high print quality. Because the print runs were so small, and because this art was generally created either early-career artists or famous artists using a pseudonym, it can be difficult to figure out what a surimono print was and where it came from.
One of our class assignments was to take a grainy photocopy of a reproduction of a surimono print and figure out who the artist was, what year it was printed, and who commissioned it. I spent at least two dozen hours in the Fisher Fine Arts Library combing through book after book after book while trying to decipher the messy Edo-period Japanese calligraphy as reproduced on the shitty photocopy, and it was only after reaching out to a few friends in Japan that I was able to get any leads.
The process of doing this research made me realize that surimono prints were a lot like the dōjinshi (self-published) comics I was studying for my dissertation, not to mention the dōjinshi chapbooks published by poetry circles and college literary clubs that I’d studied while doing a year of language training in Tokyo. What I proposed for my final paper for the art history seminar was a discussion of research strategies concerning the origins and provenance of dōjinshi, which are not only invaluable to the study of Japanese literature and comics, but also beautifully produced physical objects that could easily be considered as modern-day surimono.
The famous art historian professor turned me down flat. Comics are not “art,” she said.
Toward the end of the semester, our class went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to look at its archival collection of Japanese woodblock prints. They were meticulously preserved and gorgeously presented, and a lot of them looked like garbage. What I mean is that their material quality made it clear that they were mass-produced on cheap paper with sloppy workmanship during later print runs in which the blocks used to print them had been worn and damaged from use. Also, from both a technical and a creative perspective, the art itself wasn’t great.
While watching grown-ass adults with PhDs fawn over dirty pieces of paper with cloth gloves and padded tweezers, I realized what “art” was: Art is something that can be bought and sold for large sums of money. In other words, “art” is not creative expression that sparks joy and shines light onto living human traditions; rather, it’s an investment that should ideally be stored in an inaccessible archive until it can be liquidated as a resource and used to acquire more valuable investments. Again, fuck that.
The raw sewage icing on this festering fecal cake is that museums use the resources they amass in order to acquire stolen and looted “art” and “archaeological artifacts” specifically for the purpose of putting them in archival storage.
When I lived in Washington DC, a good friend of mine from college was working at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which had just opened in 2016. I sent him a few of my students from George Mason University as interns, and every so often we’d go out for lunch to catch up and gossip.
On one particularly memorable occasion, our gossip turned into venting, and my friend delivered a truly epic monologue on the state of the Smithsonian’s archives. Essentially, they have a ton of cultural heritage that doesn’t belong to them – including actual literal human remains – that they hide underground so that nobody knows it’s there and comes around asking for them to give it back.
Don’t get me wrong – the Smithsonian is fairly progressive as far as national museums go, and many members of their staff are doing good and important work to ensure that things change for the better. Still, hiding stolen art and artifacts in underground archives is something that all museums do. What the actual fuck. I mean, keeping human remains in a cardboard box on an Ikea shelf because they have a high monetary value on the art market? Jesus Christ.
So, back in 2016, I wrote a fanfic novella called “The Museum of Hyrule” that dramatizes these issues through the character of Ganondorf, who is a museum curator in a modern version of Hyrule. The writing feels a bit cringe to me now, so I’m not going to link to the story, but I think it was an interesting concept. Unfortunately, writing something that political for such an active and high-profile fandom made me a target of anti-fandom harassment. One of the more unhinged comments I got was an anonymous person on Tumblr encouraging me to get raped and die of AIDS if I liked Black dick so much. Charming, right? The harassment I received for “sympathizing with a problematic character” became even more intense following the 2016 election, so I learned to keep my head down.
Still, it’s difficult to pretend like I don’t care about the way culture is valued according to its monetary equivalence on an international market of the ultra-wealthy. I care a lot about how museums resist opening their space to the sort of creative expression that resonates with enormous audiences across international borders on social media, and I care a lot about how museum instead dedicate that space to historic works of art that they refuse to return to their rightful caregivers. In fact, that sort of aggressively insensitive and deliberate fuckery makes me furious.
As both concrete buildings and abstract concepts, museums serve as walls that separate people from culture while also using the standards of ultra-wealthy collectors to suppress emergent creative communities. I am not the first or only person to say this, because it’s true. This is not a philosophical conundrum, but something that affects many people on a deep personal level.
As I wrote at the beginning of this essay, I thought it would be an interesting to draw Link going to a museum on a class trip and seeing the Master Sword in a display case. A comic depiction of an Anglo-coded person going to a museum and finding that the European heritage on display resonates with him would get a ton of positive feedback on social media, especially within the Legend of Zelda fandom. Of course it would. But that’s not what I wanted to draw, it turns out.
What I wanted to draw was the moment immediately before The Evil Ganon ™ comes to the realization about museums that took me years to develop, namely: These institutions should be destroyed.
“But Kathryn,” you might be saying. “Maybe you’re being a little extreme about museums, but that sounds like it would be a fascinating story! Why do you have to write about this in terms of Legend of Zelda characters? Couldn’t you create something original?”
And I am telling you: It is precisely because of the way that “art” is commodified and valued as an investment that the best and truest stories I can tell will never be published in traditional venues. My stories are too fantastic to be “literary fiction” but not conventional enough to be “genre fiction,” and I’m disgusted by the idea of commodifying my own identity just to sell my stories. I’m trying to find a place for my work anyway, but the professional publishing market is competitive to a such an incredible degree that it’s impossible to explain to anyone who isn’t directly involved.
And also, I am telling you: It is precisely because of the way that “art” is commodified and valued as an investment that anyone would think that modern mythology is not appropriate vehicle to use to tell a story that resonates through its archetypes and allusions.
