This past Friday I attended the “Night at the Museum” event that was put on by the senior class board to celebrate the museum on campus before they start renovations. Something interesting I was thinking about while I was there was the photo section that had frames for students to pose like they were in paintings, as well as people taking pictures with the paintings in the exhibits.
The photo section caught my attention because it was making me think about how now that we have the ability to take digital photos, we still choose to pretend to go back to a time where it wasn’t available. I know that my friends and I were trying to mimic the paintings we had seen where their faces are solemn and their poses stiff. It’s kind of funny to think about how something that is so casual and silly for us was serious to someone else a little over one hundred years ago. Especially because our photos will probably be put into a large shared drive with the rest of the senior class to see, whereas paintings from the Victorian era were not able to be shared so widely so easily, and were not even meant to.
Taking pictures in the exhibits with the paintings was intriguing to me because I was wondering what the people in the paintings would have thought about us taking pictures with them. They might be upset, because as we’ve discussed in class paintings and portraits held a significant amount of meaning to the people in them. They might be upset that they were in a museum in the first place, because that means they’re being shown to many people. Or maybe it would be seen as a good thing to be hanging in a museum, because that means their portrait was worthy enough or the subject holds enough beauty to be displayed. Either way, I found it kind of funny that something that was so serious to one society is now something that’s more casual for another.
Then this event also got me thinking about how many movies take place in museums, like obviously “Night at the Museum,” “The DaVinci Code,” or “Ocean’s 8” and how the meaning of museums has changed so much over the years, especially with movies focused around stealing from museums. The theme of the senior event was “heist” with a raffle to win a fake set of jewels like the ones stolen recently from the Louvre in France. Additionally, the Isabella Stewart Gardener museum in Boston that was the scene of a famous heist that still displays the empty frames, turning a once revered art collection into more of a tourist attraction to see the scene of the crime. The theme of the event and the connection to the ISG museum had me thinking that some people are more interested in the act of the crime than the art, and just how in general art exhibitions, museums and the meaning of portraiture has changed so much throughout the ages.
Victorian Visual Culture 
I love this post! Such an interesting event through which to apply course themes. The very idea of a museum, when defamiliarized like this, seems odd, and like we are turning museums, and art in general, into what we want them to be. Thinking here of taking photos of art in a museum—firstly, it’s meta to take a photo of a picture, and secondly, this raises questions about why we’re doing it. How many times will we really go back to these photos and gain something new from them that we didn’t when we saw the art in person? How does an action like posting a museum photo on social media prove that we have turned our engagement with art, history, and culture into a status symbol? And then there’s the idea of museums as event spaces, like the MHC museum, or the museum in NYC that hosts sleepovers that are open to the public. In many ways, I think this speaks to museum curators’ desires to bring more people into museums through community oriented events that aren’t strictly about the exhibits, which then raises questions about accessibility and cultural spaces and the ways our engagement of art has changed over the years. Certainly, the subjects of the paintings probably could not have envisioned all of this!
By: Sophie Frank on December 9, 2025
at 1:14 pm