Monday, August 2, 2010

And the winner for the worst museum in Montreal goes to...

...Exhibition Centre La Prison-des-Patriotes. I still have a dozen museums to see but I'd wager that this one will remain the worst of the bunch.

The Prison-des-Patriotes, located in the basement of the Au Pied-du-Courant building, presents an exhibition on the 1837-1838 rebellions in Lower Canada, the background to the Patriote movement and the impact of these events on political life in Québec and Canada. Fine. But I was expecting a prison and instead there was just text panels. Large blown up images and text panels. I was expecting the information to be totally biased and nationalist and thus kind of amusing but sadly it was objective and fairly uninteresting. I was expecting to be offended in a highly comical way, in fact I had promised my companion that the museum would be flamingly nationalist, but it wasn't. Which obviously is a good thing, but I suppose the point is that museum went too far in the direction of boring.

If you are going to have a museum without objects, then the ideas presented should be weighty. This is not a museum of ideas, in the sense of a human rights museum (which would include objects), it is a straight up history museum. I didn't read much of the information, or take the guided tour which probably would have been quite informative, but I did skim the entire space and it was no more interesting than reading a Quebec history textbook. They could have recounted the stories of individual patriots, talked about those other than the famous names, included objects from the period... It could have been in an actual prison! Luckily it was free, but they definitely shouldn't be charging. There is nothing there that a textbook doesn't have, except that galleries have larger font.

The building is attached to SAQ headquarters. The SAQ sponsors an artwork in the entry way of the museum based on the relevant themes of rebellion, patriots, or, wait for it, the world of wine. Corporate sponsorship gone a little too far?

19 down. 13 to go.

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