Years ago, I was in the old town of Aeroscobing, in Denmark. In “bottle Peter’s house” was a museum-of 500+ bottles containing model ships.
It was mildly interesting!
A trifecta from San Diego: mostly because I’ve been so many times: The Museum of Man, The Reuben H. Fleet Science Center, and the new Natural History Museum. The New NH Museum is nice and shiny, but they took a funky-but-sorta-cool facility with some really nice dioramas and replaced it with a big airy box with minimalist displays. Not my idea of a Natural History Museum.
I’m really looking forward to the re-opening of the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. I hope it’s not boring.
Leksaksmuseet (“The Toy Museum”) in Stockholm. It’s a couple rooms stuck onto the back of Spårvägsmuseet (which is very cool and the reason we go in the first place). Leksaksmuseet is a bunch of glass cases with toys in them. The “play area” was a couple of Brio train tables. That’s it. My daughter is usually bored (but loves the buses and trains of Spårvägsmuseet).
You at least had something to look at instead of just bottles.
Millions of the fuckers, green ones, brown ones, clear ones…
The National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. I spent a few hours there with my family, then, when we were driving home, all of us agreed that the museum was a disappointment. None of us got what it was trying to say, and it left us all rather cold. It is a very nice building, though.
I should add that I love museums in general, and usually enjoy, at least to some degree, any museum that I visit. I’ve spent a lot of time in the various Smithsonian museums and many others around the world, and the Museum of the American Indian is one of the only ones that I feel negatively about.
Not been there for years but another vote for the Victoria and Albert in London. I love museums but I just can’t get into the ceramics, costumes etc.
You want to to try the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford - that is nothing but content (mostly shoved into draws under the old fashioned, glass, display cases), the nearest thing to a multimedia display you’ll find is a hand-written card naming some of the exhibits. Brilliant 
The Art Museum in Kimberley, South Africa.
We were told that it had more Rembrants than any other museum of it’s size in South Africa. Although, it might not have been Rembrant specifically who was mentioned. But someone wanted to show off to our tour group that South Africa does TOO have Fine Art–made by Famous Dead White European Men, even.
Boring. and Irritating. The museum building was not large or interesting, and while I’m not opposed to a nice Rembrant, I would not travel all the way to South Africa to see one(I’m American and so were my companions). I’d much rather have seen some more local art, or spent more time at the Big Hole or even just learned more about the history of the area. We were only in Kimberley for a few hours, and this art musuem was not a good use of my time.
The Buffalo Museum of Science is among the last of the old-school natural sciences museums, with the vast majority of its exhibits dating back decades. Almost none of them offer any sort of interactivity; it’s very much a “look, but don’t touch” kind of place where just about everything is behind a pane of glass. Today, it seems to exist mostly as a field trip destination for local elementary school students. If you want to see what a science museum looked like in the 1940s, this is your place!
The Bannockburn Heritage Center in Bannockburn, Scotland was so bad it was quite funny. It has a replica of Mary Queen of Scots’ false teeth.
I’ve been to museums that had artifacts on display that were incredibly fascinating – I’m talking jaw-dropping, OMFG, you’ve-got-to-be-shitting-me astounding – but that didn’t exactly go out of their way to call your attention to them.
At the Olympia Archaeological Museum I saw two bronze helmets, each in its own display case, glowering at each other across a doorway entrance. Okay, big deal. Bronze helmets, while neat to look at, are a dime a dozen in Greek museums. A gave them each a momentary glance, then turned to find something more engaging. At the last moment, though, something caught my eye. One of the helmets - in a typical Greek style but badly caved in at the crown - had a bit of writing scratched into the cheek flap on one side. ΜΙΛΤΙΑΔΕΣ. Miltiades.
Wait a minute. WTF? The Miltiades?
Sure enough, the guide I asked confirmed it. This was believed to be the helmet of Miltiades the Younger, a Greek general at the Battle of Marathon. The other helmet was that of a Persian general. Of course there was no label of any kind to point all of this out. Glad I asked.
Even the website of the Agricultural Hall of Fame is boring! Just thinking about a whole museum about agriculture makes me want to yawn. I can’t imagine anyone but school children happy to be taking a field trip ever visit. Yes, I’ve been there, as a school child. Makes me long for the Barbed Wire Museum.
Large portions of Harvard’s Natural History Museum are like this. Their skeleton collection in the vertebrate collection is ancient, still in the same cases. Their Mineral Hall is pretty old and untouched from the 1940s or older.
Fortunately, the Glass Flower exhibit is similarly untouched. I say “fortunately” because (although some folks are unimpressed), this collection is incredible – a couple of German brothers made thousands of models of plants, flowers, plant diseases, and the like that are flawless imitations of the Real Thing. They’re made of glass, but if you hadn’t been told that, you’d never guess it. It doesn’t look at all like the vitreous substance you’re used to. The collection is unique. And irreplaceable.
The glass museum on the island of Murano in Italy was a huge disappointment. Murano and Venice have such lovely glass art for sale everywhere. Not only that but you can walk all over Murano and see actual glass being sculpted. Yet the museum fails to capture the beauty or excitement of this ancient art literally right around the corner from them. Furthermore many of the exhibits are in Italian only.
The gift shop is more interesting than the actual museum.
This entire thread is a fascinating read. I’ve made two attempts to get to the Barbed Wire Museum in my life, only to be foiled by logistics; it seems it just isn’t “on the way to anywhere”. So now, since two people in this thread have mentioned how boring it is, I’m going to have to make a special trip, out to Kansas, just to see the Barbed Wire Museum.
And I will add that this thread has led me on an unwilling trip down Memory Lane, to the Ghosts Of Unpleasant Vacations Past, and besides the rinky-dink coal mine tour in Kentucky that, mercifully but not surprisingly, doesn’t seem to have a website, I abruptly remembered how disappointing the Wright Brothers Visitor Center was. I had three kids with me who would have been entertained by practically anything the NPS had to show them about planes, but they ain’t got nuttin’. We walked in, walked around, went “Hum…”, checked out the gift shop (nothin’), and went back to the campground.
Yeah, the Pitt Rivers rocks: it’s like the museums they used to have in Tintin books.
Fans of His Dark Materials will note that Lyra visited this museum too.
When I was a kid I got to do work experience there. Some of my duties included dusting the shrunken heads and polishing the Sundance Kid’s saddle. Even if I hadn’t had that privilege, it would still be my favourite museum EVER.
And just to continue the PR for the PR, visitors are more than welcome to open the drawers under the main exhibits. There’s all sorts of [del]crap[/del] anthropological wonders in them.
LavenderBlue:
It was probably better before most of the exhibits got destroyed in the James Bond vs unnamed ninja fight in Moonraker.
Duck Duck Goose:
I visited it on my way from Kansas City to Denver (one leg of a larger trip), it’s only about a half-hour off the I-70.
I’m glad you liked Te Papa too, I was beginning to feel very alone! I have been to Te Papa twice and been throughly fascinated, informed and entertained.
I went to see the Darwin exhibition at Auckland War Memorial last week, the exhibition was brilliant and so is the museum…now. A place I would be proud to take a visitor to Auckland. The same thing could not be said 5-10 years ago, other then the VERY moving war memorial the rest of the museum was a dusty old relic. Auckland has taken a leaf from Te Papa’s book. It has done it better but it has been inspired by Te Papa.