"The Soviet dogs exhibit is slightly interesting"… but the museum is "just annoying"
David Wilson’s magnum opus, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, earned him a MacArthur Foundation grant and supplied the subject of Lawrence Weschler’s lauded 1995 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. Not so well known is that the Culver City museum has inspired an alternative literature: phenomenally negative reviews on Yelp.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology is Wilson’s deadpan parody of museology. Most of the exhibits are fake, contrived by Wilson himself. The inauthentic is juxtaposed with apparently genuine displays of outsider art of the weirdest kind. The whole is a riff on the notion of the museum as an unreliable narrator.
Yelp is a wisdom-of-crowds website that allows users to rate restaurants, businesses, and attractions. Its median opinion of MJT is 4 stars, the same as the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and MOCA, and only a shade less than LACMA or the Getty (4-1/2 stars). But MJT gets far more 1-star (worst) reviews.
Don’t write off the Jurassic haters as naifs. For the most part, they appreciate that MJT is a cosmic, Andy Kaufman joke they don’t get. Many report they came to the museum on the advice of “hipster” friends (that pejorative appears more than once) or because of the profusion of 5-star Yelp reviews. They understand that MJT is considered to be conceptual art and are often moved to establish their own credentials as artists or aesthetes—who happen to think the museum “sucks.”
Some Yelp reviewers felt the museum's educational materials could have done a better job of explaining difficult concepts to the layperson
Some of the Yelp critiques attain a level of outsider poetry celebrated in certain of Wilson’s exhibits. An executive summary (all from one-star reviews of the Museum of Jurassic Technology):
Avoid this place like the plague.… After visiting on the weekend, I feel angry.… Basically, it’s a scam.
This place is just stupid. Really, really stupid.… I enjoy going to museums, but this shouldn’t even qualify as a museum.
I should have read further reviews before wasting my and my husband precious time. What a wretched, confusing little hole in the wall. It certainly is NOT a museum and I’d be suspicious of anyone who gave this more than one star, like maybe they work there and want more “contributions at the door” HMMM…
Your exhibits are old and falling apart. Your strange, but not strange fascinating. Strange like a hobo that I don’t want to talk, too.
i know the type of person this place is good for. i was surrounded by them in art school.
I would sue to get my money and the utterly wasted hours of my life back from visiting this collection of junk, but that would be a bigger waste of time.
For shame, Los Angeles… And for shame, English language, for lacking enough synonyms for the word contempt in the dictionary for me to list here.