6 Shockingly Brutal Realities Of Working For A Museum

6

Working In A Museum Can Literally Kill You

Library Of Congress

Indiana Jones went through his fair share of danger, but he actually might have been safer dodging booby-trap arrows than he would have been at home. There are two main types of hazardous objects that you might stumble upon in a museum: objects that are inherently dangerous and objects that we made dangerous, usually in a misguided attempt at preservation and because we're really, really dumb.

The first category covers obvious things, like dangerous animal or plant specimens, but also man-made items. One day I was wandering around in collections storage when I happened upon a box labeled "DANGER! Poison darts!" Obviously, I opened it immediately, and what do you know, inside were about a half-dozen blowgun darts dipped in poisonous frog juices from the central Amazon. Beyond natural poisons, there's always just good old-fashioned knives and guns to worry about, not all of which have been unloaded before being donated.

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"That's pointed at the highway, so make sure to keep the safety on."

5

Most People Will Never See The Coolest Stuff At A Museum

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On average, only anywhere from 1 percent to 10 percent of the items in a museum ever see the light of day. There can be several reasons for this. If an item is broken or degraded, it may not be stable enough to display. Some objects may be duplicates of others, poor examples of a style or time period, or unable to be displayed for cultural reasons (we'll get to that in a minute). Those of us who have the knowledge and clearance to wander around unsupervised in storage can stumble upon some pretty awesome stuff. I've personally found a box of items pilfered from the wreckage of the Great Chicago Fire and a set of WWI-era surgeon's equipment that still had all its original glass vials of medicine along with some device labeled "uterine speculum," which I try hard to not think about.

Via Collectmedicalantiques.com
Let's just say that those have come a long way.

4

Donors Think They Can Do Whatever They Want To The Exhibits (And Sometimes Do)

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When you picture a museum, you probably think of something like the Louvre or the Smithsonian: rich, architecturally intimidating, and well-connected. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of museums in the United States are tiny. They tend to have only one or two paid staff members (if they have any at all) and rely heavily on volunteers to pick up the slack. Until I was hired -- and I'm only part-time -- the museum I work for had only two full-time staff and a whole lot of volunteers. That's great, but this particular set of volunteers often took it upon themselves to move things around without telling anyone, which completely messed up the organizational scheme of collections storage and even damaged some objects. They didn't do it on purpose; they just didn't know what they were doing, and no one who did could spare the time to teach them.

Nomu420/Wiki Commons
"Hmm ... one leg is longer than the others. Grab a saw -- this seems like an easy fix."

3

Museum "Security" Is A Joke, And Robberies Are Common

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Forget about lasers, weighted stands, and unbreakable glass. For most museums, security gets only about as fancy as a locked door. The one large museum where I interned for a summer had security guards and keycard entry, but they didn't even work. Nicolas Cage could slip in and out of there with no more trouble than the acquisition of a fake mustache and glasses (because, obviously, we go on high alert when we see Nicolas Cage).

Walt Disney Pictures
A museum is no place for a guy with no sense of when a torch is inappropriate.

2

We Have Many Exhibits That Are Almost Certainly Haunted

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My museum had a double-sided drum in collections made up of two human skull caps placed end-to-end and covered in animal hides, and I once had to carefully document a gourd jar that was tastefully decorated with five human jaw bones, teeth and all. The coup de grace, however, came when I unfolded a Nazi flag at my history museum and found it stained with what I am 99.9 percent certain was dried blood.

bhofack2/iStock/Getty Images
It could've been ketchup, but shitty dry fries seem like something
the Nazis would've been into.

1

Much Of What You See In A Museum Is Fake

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Reproductions can be very valuable to a museum, usually in teaching or hands-on collections, where nobody cares if your bratty kid throws it against the wall or uses it to pick his nose. With that in mind, it's difficult to say how many objects specifically are "fakes," because A) museums won't always admit to it, and B) they don't always know. For instance, we once got a large donation from the will of a very rich woman who had spent a lot of her life collecting "ethnic art." One item was a large terracotta sculpture from Central Africa. For a long time, the museum was concerned that it may be a fake, since these particular styles of statues are very widely forged. The only way we could figure out for sure if it was authentic was to cart this large, heavy, delicate statue to a local hospital and put it through a CAT scanner to see if it was made of only a few distinct pieces (as the real ones are), or cobbled together from a bunch of different pieces of broken sculptures (as the "fakes" are). It was authentic after all, but a whole bunch of other objects from the same collection weren't.

Michel Brent
If the fakes are good enough to fool Sotheby's, they're probably going
to slip past your average rich old lady.

Sometimes we even have to gussy up the real things. The fossil of Sue the dinosaur in the main hall of the Field Museum in Chicago, for instance, has a false skull on it, because the real thing was too heavy to stay mounted on the rest of the skeleton. The actual skull is in its own case on the balcony above. The museum at University College London displays the mummified body of statesman and philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832. His head, however, is in collections storage in its own box. It was on his body for a while, but it started to fall off, so it was removed and replaced with a wax replica. Decide for yourself which scenario is more unsettling.

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