Museum of Jurassic Technology
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The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a small museum in Culver City, California, near the Palms district of Los Angeles. It was founded by David and Diana Wilson in 1989. An affiliated museum, founded several years later, is located near Cologne, Germany.
The museum claims to have a "specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities." This explains the name.
Its online catalog lists a mixture of artistic, scientific and bizarrely unclassifiable exhibits that evokes the cabinets of curiosities that were the 18th century predecessors of modern natural history museums. The factual claims of many of the museums exhibits strain credibility, provoking a rich array of interpretations from commentators and much critical praise; the museum was the subject of a book by Lawrence Weschler in 1995, and the museum's founder David Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius award" in 2003. The museum claims to attract around 6,000 visitors per year.
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Quotations
- ...The public museum as understood today, is a collection of specimens and other objects of interest to the scholar, the man of science as well as the more casual visitor, arranged and displayed in accordance with the scientific method. In its original sense, the term "museum" meant a spot dedicated to the muses - "a place where man's mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs." —Museum of Jurassic Technology, Introduction & Background, p.2
See also
External links
- Museum website (http://www.mjt.org/)
- Roadtrip America: A Separate Reality (http://www.roadtripamerica.com/places/mjt.htm)
- NPR Archives: Macarthur Genius Grant for Museum of Jurassic Technology (Ed Heil) (http://www.npr.org/programs/watc/features/2001/macarthur/011027.macarthur.html)
References
See also: Weschler, Lawrence (1995) "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder", ISBN 0679764895 - "Mr. Wilson" is David Wilson, the founder and Director of the Museum.