Enola gay exhibit
In principle, then, there is nothing wrong with a controversial exhibit-quite the contrary. Exhibits, everyone agrees, should not be boring they should be-to list some adjectives frequently used in praise-interesting, amusing, entertaining, stimulating, provocative, controversial. If education, properly understood, is an essential duty of museums, then the chief instrument of education is the exhibit. A good museum, however, maintains a balance of both because the two activities stimulate and reinforce each other.
Traditionally, the priority was on collecting more recently, on education. With regard to the main task, collecting and education, different museums interpret these mandates differently. These burdens must be borne inadequate responses will gradually use up a museum’s credit of public goodwill.
Not only are they committed to perform two specific public services, collecting and education, they are also expected, within their area of specialization, to help with various minor tasks presented by almost anyone. In return the institutions are understood to serve the public. Museums are not financially self-sufficient they survive only with the help of large, regular subsidies (often three-quarters or more of their annual budgets), usually from the public. For the most part, these limitations stem from the obligations of museums to society, their dependence upon financial supporters, and the sources of their intellectual authority. The efforts of museums are subject to certain basic limitations that lie in their very nature. The public has little understanding of what museums can and should do, the people who run them, and the conditions that govern their operation.
#Enola gay exhibit professional#
The failure is of interest here because it was a professional failure. No matter for the curators, historians, and administrators of the Smithsonian the task was to succeed on behalf of their institution, and they failed. 2 As usual in such cases, the cause of the Enola Gay fiasco was a coincidence of several adverse factors. Īll that remains now is the opportunity to learn from the misadventure. I suspect that it would have been a decent exhibit, not without flaws, to be sure, but one that would have performed a useful and honorable role, and that would have offended nobody, not even those who so hysterically opposed it. How good it would have been, we cannot know. Clearly, the Enola Gay exhibit should have been presented to the public in the mature form forged by its creators during a long and painful gestation period. It was deprived of the opportunity to discuss an issue of acute concern and left with the nagging memory of an illiberal thing happening before its eyes with virtually no one rising to prevent it. 1 Observers who watched the controversy unfold wasted their energies because they were not permitted to judge the end product for themselves. The opposition forces who brought down the project lost, for history will view them poorly: the resulting literature will see to that. The NASM and the Smithsonian lost, not only for the obvious reasons of wasted effort and loss of prestige but also because the cancellation broke off, irreversibly so far as can be seen, a promising new direction for the NASM. With the cancellation of the original Enola Gay exhibit, everyone lost. In June of that year, the NASM opened another version of the exhibit, sharply reduced in size and radically expurgated in content.
During its many years of preparation, the exhibit project became so controversial that the Smithsonian canceled it on 30 January 1995. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) had planned to open an exhibition centering on the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.