I’ve just got back from a little over a week’s trip to Poland split between Krakow and Warsaw and across 5 serious days of visiting things I saw 58 different places with another 2 being added in on travel days and a full day trip for a total of 60 different things and places seen.
Sadly I have to report that very little in the two cities inspired me. Much of it was fairly bog standard ‘stuff’ museums that simply displayed collections of things with very little additional context. This was true from the big museums right the way down to the small. And goodness help you if you didn’t take an audio guide or a tour because then you’d be lucky to have the first clue about what you were looking at.
Still there were a couple that stood out and I can give my best and worst and it's notable that I mentioned both of them in my last blog post about what I wanted to visit.
The Best - POLIN
POLIN is billed as a museum about the existence of the polish jew. Whilst this is not strictly speaking untrue it is more of a museum of the history of Poland but with a significant focus on its Jewish people.
I saw it on my last day of the trip but in retrospect it should have been my first stop in Warsaw as it provides the perfect primer that covers all of the most important events in Polish history in a fun and engaging way.
Image of the POLIN Museum (Picture From POLIN)
Doing Everything Right
The museum doesn’t do anything particularly new or special, but it does do everything to the very highest quality. The stories are easy to read and cleanly told with plenty of hands-on activities, or additional bits of information if you find something you are particularly interested in.
The real highlight to me is the beautiful surroundings where no expense has been spared. A variety of different themed rooms with beautiful models and scenery pieces really help build the sense of space of different things right down to having different flooring so that you can physically feel the difference between spaces.
Image from the Jewish Town Exhibit (Picture From the Association of European Jewish Museums)
Another big one for me was that the audio guide kept things snappy. It’s a large museum with lots to see. So rather than extending the timing out with an inventory of things in the room it kept to a short script about what the room itself was about before inviting you to either learn more or move on.
Touching on Difficult History
The history of the Jewish in Poland (as with most places) has not been an easy one. However, unlike some of the other Jewish museums in Poland, it managed to not give off a strong feeling of anger, bitterness, or even tubthumping pride in their heritage. These are perhaps not surprising feelings for those affected by such a lineage and I would consider them perfectly natural responses for such persecuted people.
However, not everyone is always immediately understanding of such things and I believe that it can make a place more difficult to understand and internalise. I’m not suggesting anything like ‘people should make up their own minds about whether murdering over a million people is a good thing’ or even that museums should be neutral on topics. But presenting difficult history, especially when it’s so recent, can be a tricky thing to pull off and POLIN does it wonderfully.
Primarily it does this by considering the greater context of Poland first and then coming down to the level of an individual community and then where appropriate onto the stories of some individuals
The Worst - The Museum of Fantasy Art
I have a funny relationship with art. I’m not really a big art person (despite the amount of galleries that I visit) though I'm constantly searching for that spark that will make me click with contemporary art. This is not (I think) a wholly unusual position and there are plenty of people out there who would be willing to get into art if it was willing to make itself more accessible.
So when I see about The Museum of Fantasy Art, which is a collection of the kind of art you’d expect to see on 80’s Sci-Fi Novel Covers or perhaps more contemporaneously on the face of Magic the Gathering Cards or Video Game artwork then it strikes me as a potential place for people to be able to make that connection far more easily.
Image of the Gallery (Picture from In Your Pocket)
The throughline of the ‘Worst’ museums however is often disappointment and wasted potential. And the truth here is that ‘The Museum of Fantasy Art’ is nothing of the sort. It’s not a museum, it’s not even really a gallery. Quite honestly it’s a sales gallery masquerading as something different that charges 30 złoty (about £6) for entry!
What could have been a place to start discussion about art in a language that folks are more readily familiar with, things that just look cool or perhaps trying to fit alien worlds, is instead a clinical space where the artwork is simply on the walls, unremarked on.
What am I looking at?
Much of the work comes from two main artists, Dariusz Zawadzki and Jacek Szynkarczuk. But there is nothing about these two people. Why do they draw what they draw? What is their inspiration, was the work made commercially or just for their love of art. What does it mean to draw in this fantasy style?
Like with most galleries there is art there that I like and some that I don’t but there is no context to its existence. It is there purely to be looked at and then, if they can get away with it, selling you a reproduction for between 300-700 złoty (~£60 - £140).
‘The Search for Undiscovered Cathedrals’ one of the images featured in the collection (Picture by Jacek Szynkarczuk)
It is something of a fascination of mine what things are deemed worthy of displaying in museums, especially in art galleries. And with so much incredible work being done by a multitude of effectively unknown artists across the world today this is a bigger question than ever.
So the Museum of Fantasy Art had two grand potentials here, both in connecting the public to art through a new venue but also in expanding what kind of thing might be considered worthy of display in the first place. I believe it failed on both of these fronts, and perhaps this is a bold new stride in the art world which has sent ripples through it, however that’s not where I stand and to me it is a failure. And frankly I'd like my money back.
Lessons Learned from Krakow/Warsaw
I had warned about the difficulty of trying to compare the best and worst to make a single salient point, but unfortunately there was just such a clear throughline in both Berlin and Amsterdam.
Here the success and failure are on two completely different spectrums but there is perhaps some link in the consideration behind the place. The POLIN is simply the top in its class. It’s a modern museum with modern design sensibilities which has pulled off everything to the smallest detail with excellence which likely belies the careful thought and consideration put into every part of its design. The Museum of Fantasy Art on the other hand either never wanted to be a museum (and may just be trying to cynically make a bit of money) or rather put no consideration into how the public may interact with the space.
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