Wednesday, January 9, 2008: Museums Revisited	Return to Journal TOC >>
We have some of the pomelo for breakfast (it tastes like dry grapefruit, and it’s hard to peel, but otherwise good) before trying again on the museums. Hopefully, they’ll actually be open today. When we get to the National Museum of the Philippine People - the one where the treasure galleon is on exhibit - I find out that pictures aren’t allowed, and I’m expected to leave my camera at the front desk. I’m not thrilled about that idea, partly because I’m not sure it will be there when I get back, and partly because the exhibit in this museum is one of the places I really wanted to get pictures of for reference in future books. I ask about special permission to use cameras, which it turns out entails going across the street and finding a particular person (they won’t call to see if he’s there, and they suggest he probably isn’t) and getting his permission. We make our way across the highway, dodging jeepneys, and up to the fourth floor of the massive, elevatorless building. There, we eventually find the museum administrator in charge of camera, fill out forms, and promise to leave them copies of any pictures we take and to send the museum a copy of any work in which I use the pictures or refer to them. (I also agreed not to publish them in this account.) My affiliation with the University of Connecticut helps a lot here. The administrators are very friendly, unlike the guards who’d sent us here. I’d sort of resigned myself to being asked to pay lagay (a bribe), but it didn’t happen. Dodging our way back across the street, we present the signed and countersigned form, and are allowed back into the museum. After all the fuss, the exhibit is something of a disappointment: well worth seeing, but a freighter converted into a warship, rather than a treasure galleon, which meant a much smaller percentage of what I saw was new to me. More interesting was an exhibit of earlier Asian trade ships that went down on Philippine reefs in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. That exhibit was given a lot less attention (and funding), but I learned a lot more from it, and there was more on display. Other than those two exhibits, a small room of contemporary art, and a traditional native nipa hut, there was little in the museum, most of whose massive galleries were empty or closed. (The treasure exhibit was scattered over several floors to make it seem larger.) When a massive school group starts arriving, we decide it’s probably time to leave. Stopping back on the fourth floor of the National Art Museum to allow them to copy the pictures I took, Ro and I proceed into the art museum. Here, I do have to leave the camera with a guard, while another guard escorts us from gallery to gallery. Like the National Museum of the Philippine People there are only a few, widely separated galleries, with 8 to 10 pieces of art in each of them. Unlike the first museum (which was mostly empty of people as well), here there are guards everywhere pointing the few visitors from place to place. The overall effect of the two museums is of enormous, beautiful buildings with nothing in them. The National Museum of Art has lots of terrific Juan Luna paintings (most of them in one massive gallery which is the first thing visitors see), a few fine old church carvings, and the rest is mostly filler. This is a little weird, because the local art galleries we saw were full of terrific artwork. I don’t know if the museum has a severely limited acquisition budget and few donors, or if they’re very limited in what they will display, but it left the museum a bit of a disappointment. To be fair, a disappointment with amazing architecture, though.
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