Museums as cultural institutions can hold a vast amount of influence over a public—this is nothing new. As demonstrated previously in Charles A. Wright’s piece “The Mythology of Difference: Vulgar Identity Politics at the Whitney Biennial”, we have seen the power to manipulate sentiment a museum exposes in the development of a show, in the placing of an exhibit, in the inclusion of an artist and the formation of an organizational identity. This presents a unique problem for the objective of certain artistic institutions: if they venture out of the realm of the objective into the world of art as a healing process, how exactly can the museum ensure that they will do more good than harm? Will the exhibit rectify, or will it incite deeper, darker emotions? It seems as if the wounds in need of healing the most are also the most sensitive to negatively perceived public action, and the least likely to be healed. Reesa Greenberg, like Charles A. Wright, attempts to understand the struggle between a injured public and an institution that does not seem to know its own strength.

How much responsibility can be attributed to a museum before one must take control over their own emotions and reactions? In the exhibit in question, “viewers were surrounded by Nazi imagery and left without any sense of certainty about how to respond to hitherto taboo images of Hitler, games about the Holocaust, and the sexual tugs of Fascism” (Greenberg 104). Subliminally, the museum manipulated patrons’ emotions with lighting techniques and a claustrophobic sense of space (with an excess of work spread over already cramped). On the physical plane, the museum attempted to shield viewers from some of the horrors of the exhibit via signs guiding the path to escape back to the real world. Both the subliminal and physical messages sent indicated to viewers that they were in the presence of, for lack of a better word, true evil.

The exhibit angered many by choosing to portray the emblems of the oppressors instead of the oppressed. In some work, there seemed to be a flippant callousness in the treatment of Nazi imagery—Marcel Duchamp was cited as a source for some of the works—and in others, it was simply the subject matter itself that caused such an uproar. Did the museum succeed in helping people better understand the malevolence that was the Holocaust? Did it help to heal? Greenberg posits that, in the public eye, it did not. Instead, the exhibit “fueled the argument for those who call for the end of ironic and pedagogic art and a return to beauty” (Greenberg 111). But the exhibit did more than that. It raised the question: can wounds this large really ever be healed? There may be no way to know.

Reesa Greenberg. "Mirroring Evil, Evil Mirrored: Timing, Trauma, and Temporary Exhibitions". Pp 104-118.