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This is the best-kept museum secret for visitors to Berlin. “Alles Zucker / All About Sugar” is a fantastic permanent exhibition in the German Technical Museum, and it’s all bilingual in German and English. You can learn a huge deal here with these accessible and lively displays. They uncover the chemistry of sugar (that huge crab in the photo below is made of sugar…but not what you expect!) as well as its stormy history, in which Berlin plays a surprising star role. That’s right: Berlin was the source of the first-ever European sugar! Find out all about it in my podcast episode—you’ll learn smarty-pants things to impress even the most elite Berlin insiders.

Plus, check out the museum’s other enticing interactive exhibits in my video here!

Technical Museum – Alles Zucker

Technical Museum on Facebook

Visit Berlin – Alles Zucker

Cropwatch – The History of Sugarbeets

European Association of Sugar Manufacturers – with animated video “How is sugar made?”

Technical University of Berlin – Sugar Museum (archived)

Technical University of Berlin – Sugar Museum part 2

One of the most striking private museums in Germany has to be the Museum Barberini. Contrary to the name, it owes its existence not to a Barberini but to Germany’s version of Bill Gates, a man named Hasso Plattner, a founder of SAP software. Plattner had the building constructed after a palazzo that stood on the site until WWII, but reinvented the interior to be more functional as a museum. The museum’s exhibitions are based on Plattner’s own wide-ranging art collection, from GDR artists to Warhol and – you guessed it! – Impressionists.

The first gallery (below) displays the history of the building, from the original Palazzo Barberini to the current museum. The interior courtyard (right) houses a sculpture by famous GDR artist Wolfgang Mattheuer, as well as a scenic cafe (around the corner to the right).

This is a great chance for the public to see art which, in the hands of other collectors, might easily have been locked into a freeport storage unit, never to see the light of day, fulfilling its purpose as an investment simply by existing. By contrast, showing art to the public is a benefit to the public and – depending on the applicable tax laws – to the donor. Ideally, it’s a win-win situation.

So should we hope for a Bill Gates Museum of Pop Art and a Warren Buffett Museum of Surrealist Painting? Or more extreme: should we stop paying taxes to sometimes lamentably inefficient state-run museums and entrust private donors to pick up the slack?

Private museums are wonderful enrichments to the cultural landscape, but one aspect of them requires careful reflection. A private donor is a single individual with personal preferences that influence their actions in creating a museum more than is possible in a team-based organization without a private patron. In the museum world, important private donors can influence the entire cultural landscape based on their own preferences. If Hasso Plattner had collected not Monets but plastic shopping bags from divided Germany, and displayed these in the museums, this genre of visual culture would have become much more well-known and high-value. The art market would change, and future art history textbooks might even include plastic bags. This sort of one-person influence is also present in the figure of the museum curator making decisions about accessioning and deaccessioning certain artworks in their collection; the phenomenon is simply magnified in the one-patron institution.

Similarly, certain values are expressed in the architecture of the Museum Barberini – ike any privately-built building – that reflect the donor’s wishes (in agreement with the local civic bodies, of course). If a different donor had come into Potsdam championing Zaha Hadid architecture, you can bet that the museum would look different! And it would make a different statement in the cityscape: a gesture toward Middle Eastern culture, modernism, and feminism, for instance. So here too, the power of a single donor defines not only the end result, but its message to the surrounding community.

Hopefully, in any given cultural area, there are enough state-run and generally diverse, team-based institutions to balance out such potential imbalances. Private museums have a lot to offer their communities. A perfect museum world has space for both public and private institutions, creating a plurality of perspectives.

(Watch the accompanying video here.)

I love surpises. And museums. So a surprise museum is a gift, and a GOOD surprise museum is a jackpot! In all these respects, the Ausgrabungsstätte Steinrinne Bilzingsleben (website in German) is the cat’s pajamas. This “stone channel” archaeological site is tucked away in the village of Bilzingsleben in Thuringia, Germany, surrounded by fields of grain. On vacation there recently, I awoke with the farmers driving their tractors by the hotel at daybreak. Yes, rural! A museum was about the last thing I expected from this place. Or, to be honest, a GOOD museum was really the very last thing I expected. Thank you for proving me wrong, Bilzingsleben!

Inspired by the experience, I wanted to give you a look inside; so I made a mini-video about it once I got home. Enjoy! And consider making Bilzingsleben a stop on your next European adventure. (If your German isn’t great, be sure to engage a friendly tour guide or Google Translate for your visit.) The unique (and heartwarming!) experience here – combining the landscape, display, and friendly people – definitely makes my Top 5 list of favorite museum visits in Europe.

After nearly ten years of construction, an incredible new museum has opened at a famous archaeolgical site in Turkey. What makes Antakya (ancient Antioch) special is now longer “just” the archaeology – itself spectacular – nor its disputed status between Turkey and Syria, but an entirely new model of museum. The Turkish firm EAA – Emre Arolat Architecture conceived “The Museum Hotel,” a building that hovers over an open-air museum. The museum showcases some of the best-preserved Roman-era mosaics in the world (image above by Dosseman; see more pictures on the linked websites).

Bowled over by this concept and design, I racked my brain for parallels. The closest I could come up with are the art hotels that feature contemporary art in the rooms to create a special “near art” experience – but The Museum Hotel is another thing altogether, almost taking the place of a visitor center on the site. Could this be a trend of the future, as cultural heritage sites continue to require funding and interpretation beyond public financial means?

If you’ve seen my newest video, you know that ancient statues of Hermaphrodite have a lot to teach us. They help us reflect on both ancient and modern perceptions of gender and bodies. Ideally, how they are displayed in museums would leverage this power to start conversations on these topics. They could enrich museumgoers’ lives considerably.

Yet no museum I know seizes this opportunity. (Perhaps you know of one! Share it in the comments below!) Instead, the statues are given little context or mediation to help viewers understand and value them. This means that they are often surrounded by tourists taking photos to show their friends, snickering about a body type they consider funny, and perhaps arousing. Large groups snapping photos of the famous “sleeping Hermaphrodite” statue in the Louvre are positively disturbing. Body shaming, bigotry, and sexual assault should be countered by museums, not encouraged. Even visitors who are deeply interested in the statue’s significance are left asking, Is this really just a funny picture? Is that all that Hermaphrodite was in antiquity too?

• This excellent essay on being transgender combines a first-person perspective with a scholar’s view of ancient sculpture – and revising this view based on personal experience.
• A chapter in the book Naked Truths. Women, sexuality and gender in classical art and archaeology presents the theory that Hermaphrodite was a cult figure. See the chapter “The Only Happy Couple. Hermaphrodites and Gender” by Aileen Ajootian (preview available here).
• The book Looking at Laughter by John Clarke is a foundational work for understanding Roman humor. Beware: this may irredeemably lower your opinion of the Romans forever…
• This article admirably addresses the ongoing culture of sexual assault in art, from antiquity to the present. Unfortunately it is not freely available, but perhaps some communication with the author or press could change that: Ethics and Erotics: Receptions of an Ancient Statue of a Nymph and Satyr
• The fairly new book Gender, Identity and the Body in Greek and Roman Sculpture includes a chapter on Hermaphrodite. It is a fairly standard introduction to the artworks and concepts, but not quite as progressive as one might have hoped.

A revelation has come with the new music video for the song “Dorado” by Italian rapper Mahmood. In it, the artist is shown in various locations – one of which is the “Gallery of the Kings” in the Museo Egizio in Turin. This dramatic hall is the perfect setting for Mahmood to dance and rap in part about Egypt – where his father was born. What a fabulous collaboration between modern music artist and museum! It’s beneficial to both sides. Mahmood’s video gets an evocative setting, and the museum is benefitting significantly from the press about the video. Museum director Christian Greco even gave Mahmood a tour around – another great photo op, of course, and great publicity for the museum. It shows not only the museum’s openness to allowing filming on their premises, but active embracing of the vibrant arts community.

Perhaps most famously, The Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z) shot the music video for their song “Apeshit” in the Louvre. The video is a smart and visually stunning statement that certainly won over new fans for the museum.

This week the French artist Jain released a video shot in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. The project was supported by YouTube and the museum itself is featured on Google Arts and Culture – indicating a new way to produce cultural content in future that reaches potentially huge audiences worldwide.

K-Pop (Korean pop) legend BTS released a music video for their song “Blood Sweat & Tears” that includes a scene in a museum – but no one has been able to find out what museum it might represent (the V&A is indeed similar but has a different floor and objects). Perhaps it was a specially constructed set.

Tim Baker released a music video for “Dance” last year that was shot in the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Canada. The video is such a beautiful sonnet to the museum that it could be made into powerful advertising – although the museum’s website sadly doesn’t seem to mention it.

In earlier history, German electronic hip hop band Deichkind filmed part of their 2014 music video for “So ‘ne Musik” in an art museum – but which one? Perhaps somewhere in Hamburg, the band’s hometown?

Finally, museums can reach new audiences through music videos created by visitors themselves. Both the Children’s Museum of the Arts New York and the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago have offered family workshops on the topic. A fun idea. Now we can hope for more music videos shot in museums in future to push this movement forward!

The Turkish president Erdogan’s recent decision to change Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque is significant. The political implications are discussed by experts elsewhere. Here, let’s take a look at the remarkable museum that Hagia Sophia was and, if all goes well, may unofficially remain. What is so significant about this place that it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is consistently one of Turkey’s most-visited attractions? What about the building makes it a museum, and what are its exhibits?

Although Istanbul’s cityscape certainly looked different in the 6th c. AD than it does now, it was every bit as cosmopolitan and urbanized. Some signs in Hagia Sophia, although scarce and old, give an impression of this. It will be interesting to see whether such signage will find a place in Hagia Sophia after it is no longer officially a museum.

In the center of the main dome is a mosaic depicting Mary holding the baby Jesus. They are surrounded by a gold surface that highlights their divinity. Both the divinity of Mary and her pose here as the bearer of God, or theotokos, reflect important developments in the early Christian church and iconography at the time. Mary was acknowledged as theotokos at one of the numerous church councils held in this period. Tragically, every single one of Hagia Sophia’s original 6th-century figural mosaics were destroyed in the Byzantine iconoclasm. The figural mosaics that exist today were made in the 10th-12th centures. This one of the theotokos is thought to reproduce the original 6th-century mosaic.

It is clear from this long and turbulent history that Hagia Sophia can only be a monument to history if it is preserved intact. Thankfully, the Byzantine iconoclasm was the worst destruction suffered by the building so far. The current plan is to to use Hagia Sophia as a mosque – covering the images during services – but still to allow all visitors free access outside of services. If this is maintained, and if the integrity of the building and its history is cared for, Hagia Sophia will be able to serve as an unofficial museum for a long time yet.

My newest video focuses on diversity in the ancient art of Berlin’s Altes Museum. It offers a perfect chance to collect some of the wonderful resources that museums are putting out to reach their diverse audiences, and to draw attention to this pressing issue. Here is a brief collection of some of my favorites. Please comment below with further ideas!

The video “White at the Museum” by the Lucas Brothers (shown on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee) is a highly entertaining look at the very serious subject of whitewashing Greek and Roman art. It is exactly the right dose of academic learning mixed with social responsibility and, yes, humor.

With numerous commemorative statues being toppled these days, those in front of museums have become a focus like never before. The American Museum of Natural History decided to remove the statue of Theodore Roosevelt from in front of the building because of protests (ongoing for years) about the way it depicts two figures, an African man and a Native man, behind the president. The museum had already created an exhibition about the statue and its controversy but decided to move it just last week, in light of the most recent protests.

Both the destructive and constructive acts around statues – in front of museums, inside museums, and unrelated to museums – prompt us to reflect on the place of commemorative statues in our societies today. Do historical figures serve a purpose in this memorialized context? Do personifications or symbolic figures? (Like the Lion Fighter in front of Berlin’s Altes Museum, shown at right.) Artworks have a powerful effect on their human “interactors,” as current events attest. Museums are far from neutral spaces; to the contrary, they make decisions about what to display and how to display it. The statues in front of them are just the tip of the iceberg.

UPDATE June 29, 2020: The original post from June 17, 2020 has been updated to reflect new and newfound resources on the topic, which have been added at the bottom.

Museums are responding to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, offering new materials to teach and promote anti-racism. Of course, it is also important to consider how much museums do – not just the resources they offer – to combat racism, such as offering paid internships so that not only financially well-off people can afford them. But making learning resources publically available is another huge and necessary step, central to the museum’s mission as a public institution, which is worth taking a look at. Here are a few case studies that I find particularly heartening.

The Metropolitan Museum addresses racism in its offerings in other ways. It has posted a letter from the leadership on its homepage, but perhaps more accessible and interesting to most visitors are the other resources. Such as an interview with two Senegalese fellows who worked on the exhibition Sahel: Art and Empire on the Shores of the Sahara, which opened before the pandemic closures. In this way, the museum is not announcing an anti-racist agenda in so many words, but is supporting one through the exhibition and, most of all, through the collaboration with Senegalese specialists.

The Albertinum in Dresden has organized an exhibition with the title One Million Roses for Angela Davis, dedicatd to the black rights activist’s time in East Germany. Due to open in October, this exhibition is a strong statement against the continuing racism in the region around Dresden. In this way it resembles the fantastic 2018 exhibition in Dresden’s Hygiene Museum, Racism. The Invention of Human Races – one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen, not least for its powerful intervention in a region that sorely needs it.

Do you know of other museums rethinking their materials and structures to keep pace with the current changes? Let us know in the comments below – we’d love to hear from you!