New MFA wing slowly getting shipshape

Life is full of little ironies.

Until earlier in the decade, Massachusetts boasted a museum with an unparalleled grasp of our maritime heritage - the old Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. It had galleries of ship models, interspersed with priceless maritime artifacts. And it preserved the intimate and historic connection between this region and the Far East - a connection that now looms large as the path to the future.

But then, the trustees of the PEM decided they didn't want a history museum, or a historically-inclined art museum. They wanted an art museum that would place them on the cutting edge of culture. So they funded an extravagant renovation. They reorganized their collections to stress their aesthetics, instead of their origins or their context. And they mothballed most of the maritime exhibits.

So I'm getting quite a chuckle out of the fact that our region's premier art museum is headed in the other direction. If PEM had appreciated what it already had, it might have capitalized on its assets. Instead, the best display of maritime heritage and the cultural legacy it produced will now be...at the MFA. While the PEM will be left to its futile pursuit of aesthetics, a crown its relatively modest collection will never wrest away from the MFA.