As regular readers know, ever since I stopped smoking a couple of years ago, I like to put together some kind of special little project every summer, something that gives me an excuse to be outside and bicycling a lot by promising some sort of cumulative creative result out of it; in fact, I've learned the hard way over the years that this is pretty much the only thing that will motivate me to exercise or eat healthily, not the benefit itself of doing so but the extra intellectual content that comes with attaching some sort of creative project to it. So this year I decided that my summer project would be to visit twelve of Chicago's largest or most important museums, out of the maybe two dozen altogether that exist in this city -- some of them for the first time ever, some for the first time in years or decades, because for sure it's been at least a couple of years since I've visited any of them, a big part of why I decided on this particular project in the first place.

And indeed, part of me is fascinated with just the concept of museums itself, of why they even exist and what their role should now be in the 21st century; and that's because for the most part, and definitely here in Chicago, the rise of the popular museum coincided with the rise of the Victorian Age, and I'm a real sucker for just about anything having to do with Victoriana, not just objects themselves but the lessons about life that were learned back then, and how these lessons can and cannot be applied to our own times. Oh hail, Fair Victoria! A golden time to be sure, in which a bustling Industrial Revolution and a profound rise in literacy and education inspired a certain amount of people to think more optimistically than perhaps any other time in human history, before or since, to dream of a world where all citizens no matter what their class are informed and savvy about the basics of science, math, art, history, culture and the like; this after all is how the modern museum came about in the first place, through ridiculously grand plans by pie-in-the-sky upper-classers, traveling the world in large numbers for the first time and deciding to share with the public what they were bringing back, an opportunity for everyone to learn about the exotic corners of the planet first-hand since most couldn't travel there themselves. And thus in Chicago, for example, did you see the formation in the late 1800s of the Field Museum of Natural History (started by Marshall Field), and the Adler Planetarium (started by Max Adler), and the Shedd Aquarium (started by John Shedd), not just mighty public institutions but lasting monuments to their founders' unending egotism, which at the time brought to Chicago one of the largest unified collections of natural and scientific objects on the planet, and almost immediately vaulted the former cow-town into the ranks of world-class cosmopolitan centers.

It's where I started my own summer project earlier this year, in fact, because how can you not? After all, they're still thought of to this day as the "Big Three" museums here in Chicago, not least of which is because of their grouped location in the so-called "Museum Campus," a lovely large lakefront parkland area just east and south of the downtown "Loop" district, which collectively is still overwhelmingly the largest tourist destination in the entire city. (The largest single destination, by the way, is Navy Pier, basically a giant mall just to the north of the Loop, which really should come as a surprise to no one.) And this was another big reason I decided to do such a project this summer, because as an actual Chicagoan, it'd been years and years since I've been to these places myself; when you're a local, after all, you pretty much need an external excuse to get out to the tourist destinations on a regular basis.

And I have to say, the Victoriana-lover in me was not disappointed at all, as you can see for yourself in the huge photosets of my visits I've posted at my Flickr account (click here for the Adler Planetarium, here for the Shedd Aquarium, and here for the Field Museum); this is one of the main benefits of even going to the larger museums in Chicago, I think, because unlike a lot of other cities, many of the cultural institutions here are still housed in their original 1800s locations. And so especially in a place like the Field Museum, which you're seeing in that top photo there, part of the pleasure of visiting as an adult is simply imagining what it must've been like to stand in the same exact place a hundred years ago, looking at the same stuffed elephants but that time surrounded by people in top-hats and carrying parasols, to marvel for another example at the exquisite ornate detail found in every inch of the Shedd Aquarium's core (what you're seeing in those other two photos above), all the way down to the fish-themed wall tiles and light fixtures. And I have to say, after visiting them myself, I'm kind of amazed at how much these three particular museums have been able to blend their old collections with the new, and especially as two of these places (the Shedd and the Adler) have taken on massive new expansion projects in the last few decades, effectively doubling their size while still trying to ingratiate the Postmodernist new with the Victorian cores found in their centers, not just architecturally but conceptually as well.

I mean, just take the Field, for an excellent example, which also has the distinction of being the second largest museum in Chicago (after the truly gargantuan Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park), and which for decades was known for its just unending exhibition halls full of dusty mahogany display cases, showcasing hundreds upon hundreds of stones, plants, fossils and more, in an endless progression of rectilinear spaces that can easily boggle the mind. But like most museums, the Field in the last 30 years has been slowly rehabbing more and more of their square footage into Postmodernist-style exhibition halls -- you know, with the dramatic lighting and friendly type and curving glass walls and "narrative" layout -- with perhaps now half of their total interior space converted to such a contemporary-friendly format. So it was surprising and pleasurable to see the Field enfold many of the most famous details from their old way of doing things into these shiny happy new exhibits -- just for one example, the way they retained the old Art Deco oil paintings that used to hang in the dinosaur rooms, showing what the skeletons you're looking at probably looked like as flesh-and-blood creatures in their natural habitats, and which for almost a century was about as exciting as the museum got apart from the fossils themselves. But then like I said, about half of the Field still hasn't been rehabbed; and so one of the big pleasures for me as a grown-up on this most recent trip was simply to wander around the utterly empty back hallways of some of these older exhibits (especially the "Hall of Plants" -- man, it's deserted back there), checking out the dusty wooden display cases that sometimes literally haven't been changed since maybe the 1910s or '20s, with yellowing information cards literally done up on manual typewriters.

But of course, these are also modern organizations we're talking about, which is where the conversation suddenly starts getting a lot more contentious, as it does as well with just the general issue of the contemporary museum experience in the 21st century, and what exactly the museum's role is anymore in an age of the internet, cable science channels and cheap international travel. Because admittedly, sometimes these places get their modern exhibits exactly right, a perfect combination of legitimate learning and awe-inducing visuals; take for example the brand-new exhibit at the Shedd, built literally under the museum into the bedrock because of running out of room on the surface, a recreation of typical South Sea coral reef environments that is also known as "That Place Where The Shedd Has Now Moved All Their Sharks," which includes among other elements a massive 15-foot-high water tank whose top is curved outward, so that you can literally stand underneath it while sharks swim over your head, one of the most thrilling experiences I've ever had a museum. But then sometimes these new exhibits are much more an attempt to turn the modern museum experience into one more like an amusement park, which is expressly the exact opposite reason that museums were invented in the first place; for an excruciating example, see the new hourly live show the Shedd now does in its fantastic "Oceanarium" space (a recreation of an entire Pacific Northwest ocean environment, including Beluga whales and one of the largest indoor water tanks on the planet), the "Dolphin Show Meets Cirque du Soleil" disaster known as Fantasea, in which these poor marine biologists are forced to don these sleek European Modernist costumes and go cavorting around like something from a cutting-edge Olympics opening ceremony, with not a single thing taught during the show anymore but rather the whole thing synced to a wordless bombastic New Age soundtrack, even more insulting when you consider that during their first live show after opening the Oceanarium in the '90s, these marine biologist narrators went out of their way to explain why their show wasn't like an amusement-park dolphin show, but rather attempted to explain why what you were seeing was actually the natural behavior of these creatures, and what the elements were of their natural environments that brought about this natural behavior. Wow, talk about selling out faster than a drug-addicted prostitute!

And in fact this gets me to my biggest complaint about going to these museums now; that in their never-ceasing crises over funding these days (much of it, frankly, caused by the explosion in middle-management positions at these museums, as well as upper-executive pay), these museums have mostly now resorted to never-ceasing crude grabs for your money the entire time you're there and literally around every corner, starting with the shameful ballooning in the last decade of the number of "special exhibits" at these places, that now require a separate fee besides what you paid just to walk in the front door, which is bad enough at a place like the Field which has plenty of other things to do, but is freaking intolerable at a smaller place like the Adler, where now literally (literally) half of their floor space is dedicated to exhibits you have to pay an additional fee to access, on top of just your general admission fee. (And even these general admission fees are sometimes out of control -- over 20 dollars now at the Shedd just to walk in, for example, with that amount effectively tripling if you want to see each and every single thing that's available for viewing there.) And speaking of which, ask me how much of a dispiriting drag it is to be bombarded with retail opportunities once you're actually inside these places anymore; and I don't mean simply a gift store and a cafe, because even I'm for that inside a museum, but rather a place like the Shedd now that has seven different gift stores and cafes inside its building, a space that only takes half a day to traverse from one edge to the very other to begin with.

Yes, it's something you can "learn" to "put up with" while you're there, but it's an emotionally draining experience as well, a soul-killing experience akin to having a random stranger run up to you every ten minutes, slap you in the face as hard as they can possibly hit you, and scream into your ear as loudly as they can, "GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY!" And like I said, this leads to all kinds of ethical compromises among these museums anymore, calling into question just what the different even is in the 21st century between a museum and an amusement park -- and if there is no difference anymore, why we even need museums in the first place. (And don't even get me started on the rise among these museums to host traveling entertainment-value-only cash-cow exhibits on subjects like freaking "Star Wars," a thing that makes me a little more morally disgusted every time I see it.) Like many of us realize already, there's a crisis that's been going on with these kinds of museums over the last twenty years, a crisis of identity in an age where we're not sure how necessary museums even are anymore; and unfortunately, the most common solution attempted during the Reagan Era was to try running these places as if they were private corporations, a dismal failure that resulted only in an endless downward spiral of dumbed-down bottom-line moral compromises, in order to fund their ever-increasing corporate-style bureaucratic employee structures, which were justified by arguing that these were the only people who could pull off these dumbed-down bottom-line projects in the first place, a cycle that's in danger now of completely bottoming out in this post-Bush Great Recession national hangover we're experiencing right now. It's obvious that we need to come up with a different way of doing things here at the dawn of the Obamian Age we're just now starting; and while I personally don't know exactly what that is, absolutely it should involve in my opinion a renewed concentration at these places on actual science, culture and education, and the systematic stripping of this middle-management layer that came with all the corporate thinkers back in the '80s to begin with. After that, who knows; but based on my experiences, do at least these two things and you've already removed half of the cause of the spiritual malaise these organizations are currently going through, and half of the reason why going to museums in the 2000s is simply not as fun as it was when I was a kid in the '70s.

And that's about it so far from my Summer of Museums project, except for a fourth trip last week for the first time in my life to the historic Prairie Avenue district (basically Chicago's first rich neighborhood, which saw its height in the late 1800s before quickly descending into a slum in the early 20th century), and the two private homes down there that have been turned into public museums, the Clarke House (Chicago's oldest building still in existence) and the Glessner House (a famous precursor to Modernism which must be seen to be believed -- and by the way, there's a much more detailed explanation of this neighborhood over at my photoset for it at Flickr). Then next week I'm off to the Chicago Nature Museum, which I've also never been to before; and then before the year is over, visits as well to the Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago History Museum, the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Oriental Institute, the Swedish American Museum of Immigration, and the granddaddy of them all, the mind-boggling Museum of Science and Industry (which among other things has an entire German submarine inside it, an entire 727 jumbo jet, an entire fake coal mine, half a dozen full-sized railroad locomotives, and dozens of automobiles, and with all this still only taking up only a fraction of its entire space). And before the year is over, I'll also be sure to post another update about the entire project here, and let you know how these visits to the city's lesser-known museums went in comparison to the Big Three. For now, though, toodle-oo, and I'll talk with you again next week.