In its ongoing effort to square up the universe, The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame announced that it will open branch museums in New York, Las Vegas, and the Middle East, in an effort to “provide fresh revenue streams, attract more philanthropy dollars and entice more people to visit the main hall in Cleveland.”
I’m rarely one to make an “art over practicality” argument, and I certainly have no problem with recognizing New York’s contribution to Rock n’ Roll (Eddie Money’s from here, after all), but I’ve always been bugged by the concept of an organized, highly categorized museum devoted to an art form defined by anti-establishment, anti-authority, being young and cool and sexual and abrasive and basically everything else diametrically opposed to the act of voting a leather jacket into a glass case so it can be evaluated by tourists decades in the future.
I realize this is an awfully theoretical argument to make against an institution largely devoted to preserving a legitimized contemporary art form, but regardless of any high-minded bias kicking around in my hipstery, writerly mind, how can anyone not agree that this photo is scientifically the most non-rocking thing that exists:
Once Michael Bloomberg is celebrating Rock & Roll with a half-assed thumbs up, is it still really Rock & Roll? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that Bloomberg’s triumphant delaration about bringing a museum to “the city where Lou Reed took a walk on the wild side” smacks of every parent in history trying to seem “with it” and inevitably coming off as humorously, inescapably not with it.
Any organization preserving the legacy of everyone from Robert Johnson to The Beatles to The Ramones is obviously not without cultural merit, but there’s just something disheartening about the inevitable aging process of Rock & Roll, and these museums, through no fault of their intentions, will always represent a bizarre contradiction of the spirit behind much of the material they’re celebrating. Or, to put it another way, any building that houses both Jimi Hendrix’s guitar and Michael Jackson’s jacket from the “We Are The World” video is pretty f*cking stupid.
How ’bout that? Made it through the whole post without even ripping on Cleveland.
