During the easter days, I visited that online exhibition and here’s my review.
Feel free to add your comments below!
What a great museum this is! It’s colorful (I especially liked the entrance!), and has a nice modern swing to it. They also have some other really interesting exhibitions running at the moment, like the exciting “Memphis Design”, founded in 1980 by Italian designer Ettore Sottsass. So this museum is about cassical, modern and contempoary art and design.
As I was keen on the Stones stuff, I just entered the exhibition without bearing this in mind. And that would later proof to be of importance to me. But let’s see first things first.
After browsing through the exhibition for about 2 hours, I think I have sen all the stuff that they present there. But still, I had the feeling that I missed something. So there’s a lot of things to watch and the 360° panoramas are a fun to see and use. The moves forward and backward are clearly marked, so you always find the way to go on or go back to somehing you want to investigate a bit further.
As the ticket is cheap, I have nothing to complain here. Of course, I spent more time on things of great interest to me (like the Edith Grove installation and guitars) and went by a bit quicker at others (like the stage-costumes).
What puzzled me after some while was the lack of more information, extra pictures or videos when checking out details. The background music consisted of 4 or 5 songs, starting with SFTD, so that came quickly to an end when I was about 20% through the rooms of the exhibition, it started again at the beginning. I have to admit, that I stopped it from then on and asked myself why they didn’t add more songs to the list. Maybe they didn’t get the rights?
The exhibition displays on two floors of the museum – that of some relief to me when I first thought “Oh my, was it that already?“. So there were 50% more rooms to explore – nice!!
Well, anyway, I rolled on through the rooms. And again, I missed more details, like for instance comments from band members (just think about that nice talk between Mick and Keith about living in Edith Grove) or of some contemporary witnesses. Then, I also discovered some mistake (or flaw): when showing Keith’s guitars, one important item of course is his hand painted black Gibson Les Paul, which also was featured in the exhibition. However, as much as I looked, zoomed back and forth, I could not find any of that color added by Keith on that guitar on display, although the corresponding text told the story. Strange.
I was always happy to find the icons for videos at some (not all) of the exhibits. In most cases, it was the director of the museum, ANDREAS BLÜHM, telling some details in 2 or 3 sentences. Sure enough, there was nothing new for me information wise.
It was not long after this that it slowly dawned on me what my little problem with this exhibition was: I was somehow expecting something like a visualized documentary about the Stones, with loads of videos, additional pictures and spoken texts and more music. Yup, that would have been fantastic.
I am a Stones fan since many years and have some 3.5 meters (~12 feet) of Stones bibliography at home. Thus, my expectations here were simply too high.
You see, the average visitor of the Groningen museum is interested in art and design. That’s exactly the reason why you see a lot of artwork and design in this Stones exhibition – like very nice displays and well documented items showing custumes, covers, the Stones-tounge and stage design. So this exhibition is just more directed to art and design fans than to fans of the band or the music.
In a nutshell, I really enjoyed that exhibition, although I was a little bit disappointed. But that meant to be unfair to this exhibition, that’s what I have learned from this. I encourage you dearly to buy a ticket and have a look for yourself. Two hours will fly by like 20 minutes, I tell ya! 😉
I will definitely visit this exhibition in person as soon as possible!
OK, so far my 2 cts. worth. Did you see it already? What was your experience?
