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Concept
Museum of Jurassic Technology
Summary
The Museum of Jurassic Technology at 9341 Venice Boulevard in the Palms district of Los Angeles, California, was founded by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson in 1988. It calls itself "an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic", the relevance of the term "Lower Jurassic" to the museum's collections being left uncertain and unexplained.
The museum's collection includes a mixture of artistic, scientific, ethnographic, and historic items, as well as some unclassifiable exhibits; the diversity evokes the cabinets of curiosities that were the 16th-century predecessors of modern natural-history museums. The factual claims of many of the museum's exhibits strain credibility, provoking an array of interpretations.
David Hildebrand Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2001.
The museum contains an unusual collection of exhibits and objects with varying and uncertain degrees of authenticity. The New York Times critic Edward Rothstein described it as a "museum about museums", "where the persistent question is: what kind of place is this?" Smithsonian magazine called it "a witty, self-conscious homage to private museums of yore . . . when natural history was only barely charted by science, and museums were closer to Renaissance cabinets of curiosity." In a similar vein, The Economist said the museum "captures a time chronicled in Richard Holmes's recent book The Age of Wonder, when science mingled with poetry in its pursuit of answers to life's mysterious questions."
Lawrence Weschler's 1995 book, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, And Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, attempts to explain the mystery of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Weschler deeply explores the museum through conversations with its founder, David Wilson, and through outside research on several exhibitions.
Official source
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