Museum of Jurassic Technology - Where Outlandish Meets Landish →
“Is this a variation on ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’? Not really, because Ripley’s affirms incontrovertible truth. Here some things are invented but seem true; others are true but seem invented. And it is not always clear which is which. The museum’s publications are models of pedantic scholarship with elaborate citations, some of which lead to nonexistent sources, others pointing to extraordinary historical figures, like the 17th-century Jesuit polymath Athansius Kircher.
But the effect is not to mock the attempt to find truth, or to dismiss its possibility. The sensation is half-comic but also half-inspirational, as if we were being told, ‘Look at the projects to which humans will devote themselves’: to the creation of illusion, to mastering the impossible, to comprehending mystery. One person will carve miniature figures on a pin, painting them with a hair; another will correspond with authorities on the cosmic order, offering harebrained theories; someone else will create a museum devoted to this strangeness, offering much pleasure and insight along the way.”
- Edward Rothstein’s review of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a place that has been on my bucket list ever since reading Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler’s book about the LA museum.
