Go to the ’70s exhibition Out on the street at Te Papa.
matthew henry john bartlett
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yip, been there and it’s highly recommended.
Grain of salt: ’70s stuff is fun, but I reckon we’ve got pretty lame when museums have to start parading stuff that’s only half a generation old.
Perhaps before seeing the exhibition I would have agreed. I think part of Te Papa’s project is to help NZ understand itself, and I feel I have a slightly better understanding of life now here than I did before, in a way that I don’t think I would if I’d visited an exhibition about life in the early 1900s or in England in 1700s. Why do you think it’s lame?
Fair enough; my zeal without knowledge was uncalled for. :-) I thought “lame” mainly because I imagined rows of long-haired plastic models wearing brown and orange bell-bottoms, but I gather it’s not that.
But partly for deeper reasons. We have no trouble studying the history of the past fifty or so years, but we forget that history is 6000+ years, and we repeat its mistakes. For example, popular music—and then only its fringes—seems only now to be rediscovering that percussion is an art. “Hey everyone! I’ve discovered an awesomely earth-shattering drumming technique: I call it artistic restraint!”
Thanks for your email about it (and about writing for Prism), that helps inspire me. I’ll reply to that at some point.