| on 20-03-2007 04:09
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Published in : , Prague |
 by Bethany Shaffer
There’s been talk that the National Museum will close its doors for renovation. After my recent visit, I must say it’s high time. I had neglected visiting the museum for no other idea than it was nothing I hadn’t seen before. The lure of the current photography/documentary exhibit on Charter 77 , the dissident group headed by Václav Havel and in part responsible for the 1989 revolution, was too much to keep me away, and I found myself feeling happy about visiting one of Prague’s greatest symbols.
 After buying my 110 Kč ticket, I marched up stairs to the third floor, searching among the smell of mold and peering through dust illuminated by sunlight for the exhibit with high expectations. I discovered the miniscule exhibit at the far end. The “exhibit,” if one can call it that, consists of eight poster-sized placards with nonlinear jumbled texts in Czech and poorly translated English. The photographs at the bottom of each placard range from interesting—a group of Charter members gathered for a theater performance in a member’s flat—to random: a Charter member on his morning run.
The texts are so scattered and show no transition from one to the other that anyone unfamiliar with the group and the role it played in politics would be lost. The English translation is so poor that it is, at times, incomprehensible.
A few other random Charter artifacts have been thrown into cases to spice up the exhibit a bit, but does anyone care about the sweater Havel wore during the revolution?
 perhaps the first patrons of the museum Taking my cue from these stampedes, I decided to offer my wallet reparation for the entrance free and wandered the labyrinthine halls viewing cases utilizing the same static pattern to showcase fossils or crustaceans. Thanks to a lack of air conditioning, the smell is of mold and dust and, in the heavily draped interior of the current Mammoth Hunters exhibit, of body odor.
 Aside from offending the senses, the museum’s aesthetic qualities are at times simply outright offensive—take the case of a video intended to teach children about the lifestyle of prehistoric humans and depicting sexified cavewomen leaning over fires—and insulting to intelligence: a giant bird flying above a mammoth clearly attached to a long metal pole. There appears to be a lack of effort and desire to create stimulating, interactive and modern exhibits.
Beyond the mediocre design and general tediousness, the institution lacks basic standards of building control. According to an article by Pavla Horáková on www.radio.cz one year ago, the museum hasn’t been remodeled since its opening in 1891, even after surviving two bomb attacks in WWII and machine gun fire during the 1968 Soviet invasion. The article states it would cost 4.5 billion Kč to renovate, which the museum is attempting to pull out of the government. When such an important attraction and national symbol lies in disrepair, one must wonder why the museum director feels the need to wait for the whole enchilada when he could begin with small improvements.
 sketch from the birth of the National Museum 1891
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