Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff Lebowski
Yes, Utah has a long way to go in the museum category. But I will take national parks over museums any day.
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Of course they're not mutually exclusive. We have three national parks within 1-2 hrs. of downtown Seattle (Mt. Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades), one of them (Olympic) is on the seashore and has glacial mountains.
On the other hand, national park status is not necessarily the sine qua non of natural beauty. I think Oregon has one national park, but I wouldn't trade the Oregon coast for Utah's national parks (subjective judgmet, I know) as much as I love Utah's national parks. National park is of course a political designation, and places designated national parks invariably weren't in high demand for anything else when they were so designated.
It's not an easy thing building a respectable art museum. Art museum is in many ways a misnomer since they're as much as anything museums of culture. You find the Rosetta Stone in the British museum and the Code of Hummarabe in the Louvre and there are mummies and clay pots, ancient and medieval weapons and armor, etc. in the great art museums. We don't have much like that here in Seattle, some Renaissance art, etc., but our museum has grown beyond respectable just when I've lived here, and the Asian Art museum is arguably world class.
Utah could have a decent art museum. It has enough money in-state and a rich aboriginal culture for starters. There would probably be some Mormon art worthy of secular art museum status if it weren't sucked into the LDS vortex. And some people could buy expensive European works and bring them as they have here to some extent.
The reason Utah has no decent museums (outside the U of U natural history museum, which is respectable) is simple--values. Go to Chicago and you see its public libraries, its aquarium, look like temples. Of course CHicago has a world class art museum. I once went with a Mormon relative to the Met. We visited the Mesopotamian stuff, and I told her that this came from the oldest known civilization in the West, when people first gathered in a city. I talked some about the cradle of civlization, the Tigres and the Euphrates, etc. She started trying to correlate it to stuff she'd read in the Book of Abraham. Yuck!