Museum Fur Gestaltung Zurich
Tasty Delight: The American Museum Of Natural History’s ‘Chocolate’ Show Is Full Of Empty Calories.
The “chocolate” exhibition at the North American Museum of Natural History (on view till Sept. 4) is no surprise, a trifle. It softens in your mouth, not in your brain. Charmingly undemanding (if pricey at $17 a pop), it’s the disposable summer hit of museum exhibits, an academic moneymaker targeted at the sweet-toothed toddler in us all.
I have got to admit that I become that toddler when it comes to dark chocolate. After following the floor stickers (“This way to Chocolate!”) to a Wonka-esque gold-scripted arch, I finished up winding through a maze of basic history. I made my way through the exhibit dutifully taking notes, but one thought pulsed within my one track mind : At the end of this exhibit, there’s a chocolate cafe. A chocolate cafeteria. A chocolate cafe. Around the time Spain was spreading the sweet stuff from the Mayans to Europe, I gave in and cheated.
I scuttled through the exhibit, past the antique candy wrappers, and purchased a giant bar of organic dark chocolate. Then I snuck back to the start. I was careful to hide the candy bar in my coat as I past the curators since this was completely against the rules. Nobody wants tourists smearing Mars bars on the museum’s spotless glass cases. But as a critic, I thought it was imperative that I’m employed with all my senses.
Loaded up on the sweet stuff, I discovered that the exhibit does indeed cover the fundamentals of chocolate history. You have got your wrinkly cocoa pods, your Mayan pottery, your commercial history of the cocoa trade. You’ve got your antique pellet of 1,500-year-old chocolate. Even better you have got your photo of a gigantic Easter bunny, circa 1890. 5 feet tall, the rabbit has got the chalky dignity of an Egyptian sarcophagus, and it stands, god-like, beside it is its creator, Robert L. Strohecker. The label explains Strohecker is “the pop of the chocolate Easter bunny”pretty much the best epithet one could hope for in this life.
Some of the exhibit’s historical sections were a little on the imprecise side. “Nearly a hundred years passed before other EU states caught the chocolate craze,” read one display’s label. “Were the Spanish making an attempt to keep chocolate to themselves? And how did news of chocolate spread? We’re not sure.” But there’s sufficient setting to keep an intellectual candy-lover occupied. Among stuff I learned without focusing too intently : The traditional Mayans offered the god Quetzalcoatl ritual chocolate that was “a deep blood-red color.” By 1930, there were forty thousand different types of chocolate bars. Chocolate contains the love-chemical phenylethylamine. (Though the poster rather primly contended that there is “no conclusive proof it excites the libido.”) And don’t feed your dog chocolate, it can be fatal, and it’s a waste of good chocolate.
At 1 or 2 junctures, the facts-to-dramatics ratio dipped too low for even phenylethylamine-addled me. In one alcove, visitors find a movie screen showing the swirly legend “Chocolate meets sugar in Spain.” This silent-movie caption is instantly followed by a video illustration : a gigantic brown tongue of liquified chocolate pours down from the top of the screen, followed by a spinning drift of sugar. Then the solemn words appear again : “Chocolate meets sugar in Spain.” That’s the full extent of the display.
More successful is the panoply of defunct candy wrappers, each beaming promises of pleasure. “Keep the party perkin ‘! Lady, take a bow! Serve ‘em nuggets, serve ‘em chips! Wonderful and wow!” reads one. Taken together, the wrappers form a record of cultural trends, from Brach’s Swingtime (named after the dance craze) to the Mr. Enormous Shaq Snaq (named after the rings player). There’s also a telephone-shaped chocolate mold, a hand-carved coffin in the shape of a cocoa pod, and a dispensing machine that once dispensed Hershey bars for a penny each. There’s not very much sociological depth hereI found myself pondering oddball subjects the curators could have covered, like the way chocolate imagery has been utilized to refer to black skin or the whole Cathy cartoon notion that women have some special biological need for chocolate, but a few of these tchotchkes are fun to take a look at.
François Berthoud @ MUSEUM FÜR GESTALTUNG ZÜRICH
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