whenyouworkatamuseum:

Anonymous submitted: 

 We had a visitor write an angry review about our historic house museum, giving us 2 stars, stating: “It blew, there were tons of chairs but I wasn’t allowed to sit on any of them. It’s great if you like going places where you aren’t allowed to touch anything. WOULD NOT RECOMMEND.“ 

 Sorry you weren’t allowed to put your butt on enough of our stuff.

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Editor: This made me think, “What factors actually go in to a 1 or 2 star museum review?” So I drank some whiskey and looked up some reviews of well-known museums on TripAdvisor and Yelp and then I felt the need to drink some more. Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion and art is very subjective, so some of the low rates reviews I give a pass for personal preference, agree to disagree and all that. Some even felt justifiable, based on staff or communication failures (though those also need to be taken with a grain of salt). However, the reviews below made my eyes involuntarily roll and my hand involuntarily reach for a drink. 

The Met gets 1 star because, though the art is great, the cafe is too expensive. 

But the Walters got 2 stars for the same reason. 

Know what the problem is with the Boston Children’s Museum? There’s WAY too many children there.  

The National Gallery of Art (US) gets 2 stars for not representing more European artists like European museums do. This is the National Gallery of the UNITED STATES. 

The Denver Art Museum gets 1 star for making people dizzy.

MoMA = GARBAGE and this person knows because they are a better artist than all the artists of MoMA.  

The Art Institute of Chicago Museum got 1 star because parking is too expensive, and no museum is worth expensive parking. 

The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum gets 1 star for fake monkeys, while the Smithsonian Natural History Museum gets 2 stars for just being full of boring stuffed animals, says this person with terrible spelling skills and no grasp of irony. 

There’s probably tons more, but that’s when I fell asleep on my couch hugging a bottle of Jack Daniels like it was a teddy bear. 

The museum I work at (also a Children’s Museum) got bad reviews for having too many exhibits and advertising geared toward children (and said reviewer claimed to have children of their own…) as well as a bad review from someone saying that our security was terrible because they didn’t control other people’s kids from getting in their kids’ way and that the reviewer wouldn’t be returning until we could guarantee that other visitors’ children would be civilized (though, don’t we all wish that they would be)…because we are obviously a day care and we should watch people’s kids for them…