Hi, I’m John Green. Welcome to my salon. Today, we’re diving into the fascinating world of museums! Did you know the word “museum” comes from the Greeks? They built temples for the muses, goddesses of art and science, where people would gather to admire sculptures and share ideas. These temples were the first museums, and we’ve had them ever since!
In 1683, the first public museum opened in Oxford, England, called the Ashmolean Museum. Back then, admission fees were based on how long you stayed, so rushing through could save you money! Even earlier, wax museums existed, with wax statues being crafted since the Middle Ages. A famous wax museum today is Madame Tussaud’s, named after Marie Tussaud, who made her first wax figure at 17.
Today, the U.S. has about 35,000 museums, but only 3% are accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Interestingly, museums get only about 5% of their revenue from admission fees. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London once offered free admission three days a week to keep it quieter for researchers.
The British Museum in London started with Sir Hans Sloane’s collection of 71,000 artifacts. He left them to King George II, leading to the museum’s founding in 1753. In 2014, the museum hosted a screening of “Night at the Museum 3,” but some viewers were upset by its scientific inaccuracies.
In New York City’s MoMA, there’s a piece by Robert Rauschenberg featuring a taxidermy bald eagle. Because selling it was illegal, the estate donated it to avoid taxes. This shows how art and tax laws can intersect in surprising ways!
The Guggenheim Museum in NYC began as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939. In San Francisco, companies like Intel and Levi have their own museums. The Atomic Bomb Museum in New Mexico is actually a desert site with a black pyramid, open only twice a year.
The Intuit Museum in Chicago showcases outsider artists, while the Egyptian Museum in Cairo is famous for its ancient artifacts. In 2014, employees damaged King Tut’s mask but tried to fix it themselves, leading to charges.
In 1985, a Rembrandt painting was damaged at the Hermitage Museum in Russia, taking 12 years to restore. The Hermitage is Russia’s largest art gallery, starting with Catherine the Great’s collection in 1764. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., owes some of its collection to the Hermitage.
In 1966, a flood in Florence, Italy, threatened art collections, but volunteers known as “mud angels” helped save them. The Metropolitan Museum in NYC has unfinished stone stacks meant to be statues, but the project was too costly.
The Reina Sofia in Spain is a former hospital, and the Tate Modern in London was once a power station. The Retre Art Museum in Finland displays art in underground caves, and Banksy once tricked the British Museum with a fake cave painting.
The National Palace Museum in Taipei has the largest collection of Chinese art, rotating 10,000 artifacts at a time. Before WWII, they moved their collection to Shanghai for safety. The National Gallery London did something similar, sending paintings to Wales.
The Tate in London protected a large painting with a brick wall during WWII. In 1990, the National Gallery of Canada bought a controversial painting, sparking debates. The New Museum in NYC once had a 102-foot slide for visitors!
The Louvre in Paris started as a fortress in 1190 and became a museum in 1793. During Napoleon’s rule, it was called the Musée Napoleon. Today, there’s a debate between British and Greek museums over the Parthenon Marbles.
The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., has unique items like Warren Harding’s pajamas and a taxidermied carrier pigeon. They once joked about displaying Wonder Woman’s invisible plane for April Fool’s!
The National Museum of the American Indian has a fire pit for authentic cooking. In Scotland, the Gallery of Modern Art has a questionable Modigliani painting, but its valuable frame keeps it on display.
Thanks for joining me on this museum adventure! Let me know your favorite museum in the comments, and remember, don’t forget to be awesome!
Imagine you are a curator at a museum. Choose a theme for your exhibit, such as ancient artifacts, modern art, or a specific historical period. Gather items from home or create drawings and models to represent your theme. Present your exhibit to the class, explaining the significance of each item and how it relates to your chosen theme.
Select a famous museum from around the world, such as the Louvre, the British Museum, or the Smithsonian. Research its history, notable exhibits, and any interesting facts. Create a short presentation or poster to share with the class, highlighting what makes this museum unique and why it is important.
Imagine you are tasked with creating an advertisement for a museum. Design a poster or digital ad that captures the essence of the museum and encourages people to visit. Consider including images of famous exhibits, interesting facts, and any special events or features that would attract visitors.
Take a virtual tour of a museum that offers online access to its exhibits. Choose a museum from the list provided by your teacher or find one on your own. Write a short report on your experience, describing the exhibits you found most interesting and any new information you learned.
Participate in a class debate on a museum-related topic, such as the repatriation of artifacts or the role of museums in education. Prepare your arguments by researching the topic and considering different perspectives. Engage in a respectful and informative debate with your classmates, supporting your points with evidence and examples.
Sure! Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript:
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Hi, I’m John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is a Mental Floss video, and you know we got the word “museum” from the Greeks. They used to build temples to the muses, who were the goddesses of art and science, so the temples featured sculptures, and intellectuals would hang out there. These buildings were known as museums. We’ve had museums pretty much ever since. Anyway, that’s the first of many facts about museums I’m going to share with you today.
This video is brought to you by Geico. In 1683, the first public museum on record opened in Oxford, England. It was called the Ashmolean Museum, and going through it quickly meant saving money because admission fees were calculated based on how much time people spent there. But there were wax museums even earlier; people have been making wax statues since the Middle Ages. In the late 17th century, French sculptor Antoine Benoit had a group of 43 wax figures in an exhibit that traveled the country. Speaking of which, Madame Tussaud’s wax museum is named after a real person, Marie Tussaud. She was an artist and made her first wax figure in 1778 at the age of 17.
Nowadays, including a couple of Madame Tussaud’s, there are about 35,000 museums in the United States, but only about 3% of them—149, in fact—are accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Here’s another low percentage: on average, U.S. museums get an estimated 5% of their revenue from admission costs. Speaking of admission, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London had an interesting policy in the 19th century: there was free admission to the main building three days a week, and then they charged money on the other three days. This kept the museum quieter, sometimes helping people like students who were doing research. On the seventh day, they were closed. I like that policy, but I think I prefer the Ashmolean’s policy more; I want to be able to rush through a museum and save some money.
Another famous London museum is the British Museum. This one began with one man’s collection of 71,000 artifacts. He was a naturalist and physician named Sir Hans Sloane. In Sloane’s will, he left the items to King George II, who, you know, didn’t have enough stuff or money, I guess, which was how the museum got its start in 1753. Staying with the British Museum but jumping forward in time a bit, in 2014, filmmakers did a screening of “Night at the Museum 3: Secret of the Tomb” there because that’s where the film takes place. Employees were appalled by the lack of scientific accuracy at the screening, though. At one point in the movie, a recreation of Pompeii gets covered in lava, and according to one source, an audience member audibly said there was no lava at Pompeii; it erupted with a pyroclastic flow. I guess they hadn’t seen “Night at the Museum” one or two, which are not noted for their scientific accuracy.
Here’s an interesting story about a piece of art from 1959 by Robert Rauschenberg, currently at MoMA in New York City. It was inherited by the estate of an art dealer and is a collage containing part of a taxidermy bald eagle, a bird that is protected by the federal government, meaning it was illegal to sell dead versions of it. But the IRS wanted to collect $29.2 million in taxes from the estate because of the piece’s value. So eventually, the estate agreed to donate it to a museum so they wouldn’t have to pay those taxes. Slightly off topic, but in general, the art of tax avoidance involves quite a lot of art.
Anyway, another amazing New York City museum is the Guggenheim. In 1939, the museum started as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in a former automobile showroom on East 54th Street. Robert De Niro’s dad was actually one of the guards there part-time while working on his own painting career. There are some interesting corporate museums in San Francisco; companies that have their own museums there include Intel, Levi, Wells Fargo, and Takasaki. Another place worth visiting is the Atomic Bomb Museum in New Mexico. Although it’s often called a museum, it’s actually just a large expanse of desert with a black pyramid commemorating the site where the first atomic bomb was detonated. But you should probably schedule well in advance because it’s only open to the public for six hours in the spring and six hours in the fall.
Then there’s the Intuit Museum in Chicago, which is interesting because it displays the work of so-called outsider artists who don’t have much interaction with the typical world of art history or art practice. Of course, lots of museums have artifacts from ancient Egypt, but the best such museum is the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The Egyptian Museum was in the news recently because in August 2014, two employees damaged King Tut’s burial mask, and rather than coming clean, they tried to fix it themselves by using epoxy glue. The mask has since been restored, but the employees face charges.
While we’re on the subject of damaged museum artifacts, in 1985, a man threw sulfuric acid on a Rembrandt painting at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The painting was called “Danaë,” and it was also sliced with a knife. It took 12 years to restore it, but now it’s back on display. By the way, the Hermitage Museum is the largest art gallery in Russia. In 1764, Catherine the Great bought 255 paintings from Berlin, and that was the original collection, but it’s grown quite a bit since then. We can actually thank the Hermitage Museum for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. because between 1930 and 1931, Andrew Mellon bought 21 of their paintings to help the Soviet economy. A few years later, Mellon gave those paintings to the United States government, and that’s how the National Gallery began.
Florence, Italy, is home to an amazing collection of art. So when there was a huge flood there in 1966, people were, of course, very worried about that art, and with good reason. Almost a thousand people from all over the world, known as “mud angels,” took on the risky job of going to locations like the Uffizi Museum and salvaging what they could. But let’s go back to New York City for a minute. The outside of the Metropolitan Museum is actually unfinished. There are four stacks of stone toward the top of the building that were supposed to be carved into statues at the beginning of the 20th century, but the trustees vetoed the expensive project, and the piles of stones still remain.
One of the many cool things inside the Met is the oldest surviving piano; it’s an Italian instrument from 1720. The Reina Sofia, another world-class museum, is in a building that’s actually a repurposed hospital that dates originally from the 18th century. The museum itself opened in 1990, and the Tate Modern Museum in London also has an interesting past; it’s an old power station. The building was finished in 1963 and functional until the 1980s. The museum opened in May of 2000.
The Retre Art Museum in Finland had an unusual way of displaying art; the building has a series of underground caves, and the galleries were as far as 100 feet underground. Speaking of caves, in 2005, the artist Banksy tricked the staff at the British Museum by taping up a cave painting in their gallery of Roman artifacts. Of course, it wasn’t actually a cave painting; a figure in it was pushing a shopping cart, for one thing.
Moving from fake cave art to real Chinese art, the largest collection of the latter can be found at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. They have about 650,000 items that are consistently in rotation in groups of 10,000 artifacts, so basically, you have to go to the museum like 65 times to see it all. Right before World War II broke out, the Palace Museum staff got worried about their priceless collection, so they packed up the entire thing and sent all the artifacts to Shanghai. For that, they needed four months and 1,342 crates. The National Gallery London did something similar before World War II; 50 paintings were sent to Wales, then the Munich Accord was signed in 1938, prompting the staff to have the paintings sent back. One year later, it was clear that a war was going to happen, so the staff packed everything up again and sent it to Wales because, you know, nobody was going to bomb Wales.
The Tate in London also packed everything up before the war, except for one painting, Stanley Spencer’s “The Resurrection,” which is about 9 feet by 18 feet. Because of its size, they just built a huge brick wall in front of it. Speaking of the stress paintings put museum staff through, in 1990, the National Gallery of Canada bought a barn at Newman piece called “Voice of Fire” for $1.8 million and ignited such a firestorm of controversy that there were debates on the price in Parliament, and the curator of the piece went on national television dressed as the painting to defend the acquisition.
An even more interactive piece of art lived at the New Museum in New York between 2011 and 2012; it was a 102-foot-long slide that people could go down. An estimated 30,000 people, including this guy, did so before it closed. About 800 years earlier, the Louvre was built. The location was originally a fortress put up in 1190 to protect citizens from the Vikings. It became a museum in 1793, and it wasn’t always called the Louvre. When Napoleon was in power, it got renamed the Musée Napoleon, because of course it did. Anyway, when Napoleon was on the outs in 1814, it became known as the Louvre.
While we’re on the subject of Napoleon, during the Spanish War of Independence, his cavalry and gunpowder were stored at the Elpr Museum in Spain. These days, there’s a lot of sparring among museums about which artifacts should be in which museum, but there’s a particularly interesting fight between the British and Greek museums over the Parthenon Marbles, sculptures from the 5th century BC. Basically, the British government bought the statues in 1816 from a lord who said he got them from an Ottoman Sultan. In 2009, Greece opened its new Acropolis Museum as a way to show that they had a good location for the marbles, but the British Museum pretty much refuses to give them back, and they’re still there to this day. It’s an ongoing argument.
Let’s move on to some interesting items you can find at the U.S.’s Smithsonian museums. If you’re looking to see Warren Harding’s silk pajamas, a body that was unintentionally preserved when all of its fat turned into soap, or a taxidermied carrier pigeon who delivered messages during World War I, you should head to Washington, D.C. immediately. One thing you won’t find at the Smithsonian is Wonder Woman’s invisible plane. For an April Fool’s joke in 2015, the museum released a statement saying that it was displaying the plane for one day only, but of course, you know, invisible.
We couldn’t finish this episode without a fact about museum cuisine. The National Museum of the American Indian, also in Washington, D.C., has a fire pit in its kitchen so it can serve more authentic food. Finally, I returned to my salon to tell you about the fake Modigliani painting at the Gallery of Modern Art in Scotland. Experts are pretty sure the work isn’t a true Modigliani, but the frame is from the 17th century in Italy, and it’s worth quite a lot, so the piece stays in the museum.
Thanks for watching this video, which is made with the help of all of these lovely people, and thanks again to our friends at Geico for sponsoring today’s video. Let me know what your favorite museum is in the comments. Also, let me know if you remember the episode of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” where Scott and Kourtney thought they had inherited a Modigliani. That one was so good! Anyway, as we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome!
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This version removes any inappropriate language and maintains a respectful tone while preserving the content’s essence.
Museum – A building or place where works of art, scientific specimens, or other objects of permanent value are kept and displayed. – The students visited the museum to learn about ancient civilizations and see the artifacts up close.
Art – The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture. – The art class focused on painting techniques used by famous artists throughout history.
History – The study of past events, particularly in human affairs. – In history class, we learned about the Renaissance period and its impact on European culture.
Artifacts – Objects made by humans, typically of cultural or historical interest. – The archaeologists discovered several artifacts that provided insight into the daily lives of ancient Egyptians.
Galleries – Rooms or buildings for the display or sale of works of art. – The art galleries in the city showcased a variety of modern and classical paintings.
Sculptures – Three-dimensional works of art created by shaping or combining materials such as stone, metal, or wood. – The museum’s garden featured sculptures by renowned artists from around the world.
Collections – Groups of objects or works of art gathered for study, comparison, or exhibition. – The museum’s collections included rare paintings and historical documents from the 18th century.
Exhibitions – Public displays of works of art or other items of interest. – The new exhibitions at the museum attracted visitors interested in contemporary art.
Preservation – The act of maintaining or protecting something from decay or destruction. – Preservation of ancient manuscripts is crucial for understanding historical events and cultures.
Controversies – Disputes or disagreements, especially those that are public and involve differing opinions. – The artist’s latest work sparked controversies due to its unconventional style and subject matter.
