Museums are more than just nostalgia

Re: “Tristin Hopper: The staggering mediocrity of the new $375.5M Royal Alberta Museum,” Oct. 12

It’s a sign of the times when a trite and whiny blog post is printed in a national newspaper.

Tristin Hopper’s tantrum is a blur of lazy bloviating. There are potshots at the cost of the museum; comparisons of museum displays with those at other museums (which have completely different collection mandates); a bizarre fanboy’s plea for holograms; a stray reference to the can-do spirit that got West Edmonton Mall built (hooray for the biggest thing of its kind!); and other splenetic bits of wisdom about what should have been in the glass cases: more politics; more about Alberta’s vanquishing of the rats; more “rippling oceans of bison,” whatever that means outside the context of a Prairie boy’s poem. It’s unfortunate that the pen got the best of Mr. Hopper. There was real promise for the piece when it began as an elegy, reminding readers of the “explosive” Oilers of the 1980s and their part in touching the “hearts of a recessionplagued Alberta.”

I wiped a tear from my eye as I contemplated the Royal Alberta Museum’s missed opportunity to put regional antique malls out of business by trafficking in the finest of Gretzky, Coffey, and Kurri tchotchkes.

Museums aren’t about personal nostalgia for a place, they’re about history though, yeah, a Peter Lougheed hologram would have been super sweet — and completely tasteful.

Connor Houlihan, Edmonton