Sunday, September 27, 2009

Two Lightly Animated Cats Discuss Museums



I have mixed feelings about this video--it is amusing and might be a good starting point to discuss museums and their significance with students. But it has the flavor of an essay by a very bright undergraduate who mistakenly believes she has single handedly invented critical thinking about her topic. This flavor because that is exactly what the video is, with the addition of cats. The YouTube description reads:

Recently Kim's been obsessing over museums, her new "hobby." Here she reads from her latest report, "The Creation of Value: meditations on the logic of museums and other coercive institutions." Mildly unpleasant Dead Pinky Story also included (free poster available for download at (ww.PinkyShow.org).

[Hat tip to Twitter friend Steven Lubar.]

2 comments:

Katrina said...

I thought it was adorable! I also discovered it via @lubar on twitter (go #twitterstorians network!!), and immediately emailed it to my friends.

I agree with your "precocious undergrad" assessment to an extent, but I was actually impressed at some of the sophistication of what was presented - in a format I assumed to be aimed at children. I hadn't seen the Pinky Show before, but I think it's an interesting project.

Larry Cebula said...

Katrina: After some casting about the project website (http://www.pinkyshow.org/) it less than clear to me who they think is the target audience. The eclectic list of topics seems more or less congruent with progressive just-outside-the-mainstream outfits such Democracy Now.