Some Museums Are More Equal Than Others...

Planting a museum in the parkland along Chicago’s waterfront seemed as natural an act, for most of its history, as planting a tree there. That city’s breathtaking waterfront parks are host to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Museum of Science and Industry – a solid majority of the city’s premier cultural institutions.

Chicago remains the place I'd love to visit in the States, and it's mainly for the museums. But others would rather not see them, it seems:

It came as little surprise that George Lucas and other backers then chose a lakefront site for his proposed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Yet in 2016 their proposal prompted fierce opposition and a lawsuit from a local nonprofit group, Friends of the Parks, that eventually sent the museum all the way to California in search of a home.

So all presumptuous would-be museum builders should think they won't get a warm welcome?

Well...

Less than two months later, the desired location for the Obama Presidential Library was announced – in lakefront Jackson Park. Friends of the Parks won’t be filing a lawsuit against this proposal – but they are once again opposed. Times have changed.

Shocker, eh?

But what's so bad about a museum, a temple of learning and culture, anyway? Well, it seems the grasping hand of the SJWs has reached here, too. They just aren't modern and 'socially responsible' enough for them:

Like any search for a home, these issues often reveal as much about their tenants as about real estate, and the way they have shifted over time sheds considerable light on the evolving character of museums themselves.

Evolution into something unrecognisable:

The starchitect’s favourite creation was surely the museum, rising out of so many locations in the 80s and 90s. As one eminent among their number, Michael Graves, commented at the Architectural League of New York in 1986: “I think this is a moment in history where we have to realise we’re not just building Kunsthalles or picture galleries. We’re building institutions that have places for discussion, places for study, and a social climate as well as a climate in which to see painting and sculpture.”

Visit your favourite museum while you can, before it goes the way of the public library....