Commentary EXHIBIT REVIEWS—TWENTY YEARS AFTER BERNARD S. FINN In 1968 Thomas Leavitt formally suggested that museum exhibits should be reviewed in this journal.1 As he pointed out, it was not the first time someone had called for professional critiques of museum exhibits, but it probably was the first time the suggestion had been made with respect to the history of technology. More important, the proposal had results. After a modest beginning, the number of reviews published in the pages of Technology and Culture has grown to the point where it is now difficult to pick up an issue without finding at least one or two. By my count, fifty-eight reviews have appeared through the end of 1988 (almost half of them in the past three years). This is quite a remarkable development, and one is prompted to ask: What effects have these reviews had? And can adjustments be made to increase their usefulness? Certainly they have been informative. Readers of this journal now know that exhibits dealing with technical history exist in reasonably large numbers and that some of them are especially worth seeing. But the reviews were expected to serve a higher purpose. The hope was that they would stimulate a dialogue in the academic and museum communities about the value of exhibits and that they would suggest ways that exhibits could be improved. Such effects are difficult to judge, but my personal opinion is that the reviewing process has failed to live up to its potential, in large part because the right questions are not being asked with any consistency. The situation is clouded, for exhibits have changed over these two decades in response to a number of other factors. Museological techniques have altered dramatically as silk screen has replaced typed labels, as slide shows have given way to motion pictures and then to tape and video disks, and as graphics have increasingly been emDr . Finn is curator, Division of Electricity and Modern Physics, at the National Museum of American History. ‘Thomas W. Leavitt, “Toward a Standard of Excellence: The Nature and Purpose of Exhibit Reviews,” Technology and Culture 9 (1968): 70-75.©1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3004-0006$01.00 993 994 Bernard S. Finn ployed as supporting material. Use of these aids has been a mixed blessing. They can add much to the visual appeal of an exhibit and can be critical in interpreting the technology. But there is also a disturbing tendency to emphasize aesthetics over content, and, be cause it is difficult and expensive to make changes, exhibits are more likely to remain frozen long after errors have been acknowledged or benehcial modifications identified. These exhibits cost more, and it is a mark of the success of many technical museums that they are able to mount shows with six- and seven-figure budgets. But money often comes at a price. In a variation on Parkinson’s Law, exhibits expand to consume the available funds; and in the act of consumption they may extend themselves beyond the reach of the basic artifactual evidence. Furthermore, the more expensive the exhibit, the more visible and permanent it becomes, and the greater the difficulty it has in being strongly interpretive or controversial. Finally, money obviously has a source—often a specialinterest source. As Michal McMahon eloquently noted in his review of the National Air and Space Museum,2 legislators, as well as corporate executives, have opinions about technology, and they can be just as vocal in expressing them when expenditures are approved—in this case, encouraging a celebratory sense of progress in air and space technology. And even if the museum maintains a firm hand on content, there is always the nagging question of whether the muse um’s long-range program has not been adjusted to treat subjects interesting to potential sponsors rather than those that are more appropriate to the qualifications of the staff and to the collections. Nevertheless, one very important change can be attributed to current trends in the history of technology, strongly reinforced by reviewers. In 1973, in a provocative discussion of “Museums and Technological Utopianism,” George Basalla expressed...