Museum Presentism is multi-faceted. It can mean the actions of museums for short-term gain or without long-term vision. It can also mean that history is pushed to the corners for exhibitions of Right Now.

The Museum of American Finance has an exhibition entitled “Tracking the Credit Crisis”, documenting finance from 2007 to 2009.

Awesome.

There’s so much going on here. This is a museum acting almost like a journalist with the most  integrity ever and reporting on current events, to which I applaud such a move. But part of me shouts out when something appears in a museum that’s barely a week old (and isn’t art).

“You cannot really document history until well after the fact,” acknowledges Leena Akhtar, who co-curated the exhibit at the museum just steps away from the New York Stock Exchange.

I’m glad there’s an acknowledgement of this, which leads me to hope that they’ll be updating the exhibition as more news comes along.

It’s a finance museum doing probably the most important financial event in 80 years, so it does make sense. The point I’m making about museums dabbling in journalism is more a point about the current state of media journalism. Open any newspaper or look at the rows upon rows of magazines and you’ll see what sells is celebrity or the insipid. Proper journalists, those people with actual journalistic skills as opposed to any idiot with a column, are being slowly phased out.

So I warn about the dangers of going down this route. The potential reward? Museums could become the replacement for the dying print media industry to act as the “real” in this digital world. (Must investigate further).