A Denver Museum: Art in its Natural Habitat Essay

The Denver Museum as a building itself was already a work of art in aesthetic perspectives. Its roofs in geometrical proportions have already stunned me gazing upon its architecture. To be amiss by something as beautiful makes me expect that my experience inside the Denver Museum is an unforgettable one.

The main collection that I would like to describe would be the Prehistoric Journey that featured fossils of dinosaurs such as the Allosaurus and Stegosaurus battling each other with the Diplodocus at the same scene. Other museums would exhibit dinosaur replicas but the Denver Museum exhibition of their Prehistoric Journey experience catered a rather realistic curation of a 3.5 billion year scene bringing the audience the feel and the vibe of the actual event in time. Fossils of leaves were also arranged in such a way that it is presented to the people visiting the museum for informative purposes. The actual artifact is presented with a description of the object and how it was preserved or found. These artifacts are presented in a manner that informs the visitors of what had been in the past.

I would say that the collection that I have observed was more like a balance of an artifact and art the first time you look at it: It was basically an art because the whole package was in a context wherein the visitors were invited to be in a time-traveling experience where the objects were presented as artifacts. The visitors were invited to look at the whole scene and make them feel it, which is art since art is an application of an idea. The objects in the Prehistoric Journey Collection were grouped in a way that it would look like an actual live event as a whole but without the life in it. Meanwhile, the exhibit can also be an artifact because it was presented as an artifact because they conveyed information if one object was to be taken into as an individual item. Therefore, the whole event was taken by the curator in a grouped manner and can be an art exhibition, at the same time, there are certain cautions that talked about the specifics in the whole scene which can be taken as art.

Other footnotes talked about just individual fossils. An example of this would be the fossilized leaves that the visitors were allowed to pick up. They had a brief introduction to the fossilized objects which they made the visitors have the feeling that these were real artifacts since artifacts are actual objects that people at the present can learn from.

Although the whole set of Prehistoric Journey exhibit can be taken in both the light of art and artifacts, to look it closely would be like looking at it as an art rather than an artifact. The curator has made a story out of the Jurassic set taking it into the curator’s imagination. It was actually an application of the curator’s imagination put into an exhibit to form an artifact like feel for this certain collection. For example, when you look at the main items of the fossils, (which in this case are the fossils of the dinosaurs) you will see that it actually tells a story that comes from the curator’s imagination. The set then invites the audience to look into the curator’s mind and experience what it was like based on the concept that the whole context is put in the year when the dinosaurs lived.

The lighting in the set also added a sense of art in the arrangement of the Jurassic collection. It added the atmosphere of the audience’s experience to what was being presented. The artistic presentation of the collection entwined with the fact that it was effectively sharing information to the audience by making them in the picture as well.