Whales: Giants of the
Deep at the American Museum of Natural History
Whales: Giants of the Deep, the new
special exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, which runs
through next January, is slightly dense but enormously informative on the
always entertaining subject of cetaceans so long memorialized in the museum’s
Milstein Hall of Ocean Life. It may, in
fact, be the most enduring image of the museum in many young (and older)
minds—that of the swooping blue whale, seemingly diving down into the lowered
hall beneath the mezzanine, baleful and silent, forever frozen midway to the
ocean floor.
Whales does tackle the blue version of
said aquatic mammal, but not exclusively.
In fact, sperm whales take up much of the special exhibition hall on the
fourth floor of the illustrious museum.
The exhibition traces the whale’s evolution from a hulking, hairy land
creature into the majestic oceanic behemoth it is today, as well as noting the
hundreds of whale and dolphin species, describing the labors of marine
biologists who tag the more elusive species, and the history of the Maori
population of New Zealand in relation to their mammoth neighbors.
So there is
much to see here. But the museum, as
usual, is professional in not allowing its masses of pure information to
overwhelm visitors. The exhibition hall,
cool, dry, and dark, is welcoming and sparsely paneled with informative blurbs
on whales’ current status (many are beached, for various reasons including
climate change) and their history (a copy of Moby Dick and a scrimshaw whale
skull are on hand). However, the
clearest example of the museum’s all-out sensibility in terms of these yearly
new installations in this case is skeletons.
Bones,
bones, bones—casts and fossils, real and fake—are everywhere in Whales, case in point being the two
gargantuan sperm whale skeletons that hang suspended over the exhibit’s second
room. One’s 58 feet from nose to tail,
and it shows. (The other’s slightly
smaller, but you’ll learn it’s not her fault, as she apparently had
arthritis.) These kind of touches are
what make this museum what it is. In
this exhibition hall’s history, many shows with an emphasis on “big—” 2011’s The World’s Largest Dinosaurs being a
prime example—have passed through. Whales doesn’t exactly seem final enough
to be that series’ culmination, but it’s certainly thorough.
“Thorough”
can sometimes seem a tired term for AMNH, their specialty, what makes them
unique or brilliant or worth visiting, but not exactly specific enough to
warrant a trip to the Upper West Side.
The fact remains, however that “thorough” is not the sole but certainly
the primary attraction to any of the many special exhibitions the museum has
hosted over the years. There have been
some, such as Creatures of Light:
Nature’s Bioluminescence or Beyond Planet Earth:
The Future of Space Exploration, both from 2012, that were visually beautiful, but
for these two subject allowed more wiggle room for artistic design. This exhibition, with its not insubstantial contributions
by New Zealander museum Te Papa, is more about the pure information of whale
evolution and preservation than about the glamour of lighting and
curation. Still, it can be hard not to
miss some of the museum’s other offerings.
All the special exhibitions have common aspects, but something about
the atmosphere has changed to make this more of a lesson than an experience.
However, it remains an
informative lesson, and an important one.
Since we still know so little about the largest animals ever to exist,
and the annual population growth for some species remains as low as 3%, it must
be a primary mission of an institution like AMNH to inform us about such an
animal’s characteristics as well as its plight.
This the Natural History Museum does as well as ever.
The American Museum of Natural History is located at West 81st Street and Central Park West. The exhibition runs through January 5, 2014.
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