Curatorial Notes on The Hall of Fame Hall of Fame

THE HALL OF FAME HALL OF FAME celebrates the uniquely American phenomenon of the hall of fame—a grass roots museum that reflects the passions, concerns and beliefs of twentieth-century America. Serving a deep need in our culture, halls of fame began to appear in the 1930s and proliferated around the country to currently number almost two hundred. This exhibition in fact could only house a quarter of those halls, and includes large institutions of international stature and modest places run by one highly committed believer. Some have very serious goals while others are more lighthearted in their vision. Both equally offer insight into our national values.

Halls of fame are walk-in textbooks narrating an alternative American cultural history. Such histories are based on values and interests rarely considered in the exhibitions in other kinds of museums, notably, those values and interests of the middle and working classes and the eccentric or even outlandish. The displays form a populist self-portrait of the century's attitudes toward fame, with implications for understanding ideas in the United States about aging, success, time, and especially, memory.

It is a commonplace that museums are founded as monuments to the social status of their wealthy benefactors. With leadership and passions from wholly different social strata, new kinds of cultural institutions in recent decades have often become a means of disseminating a more populist taste. Such institutions pride themselves on being of the everyday world of most Americans, as opposed to the modernist notion—to which most museums still subscribe—of an autonomy and isolation from that workaday world. Their respective exhibits betray these biases: the museum's objects aspire to be almost without history or context, displayed in safe-deposit–like vaults. Sources and influences are denied. Halls of fame, in comparison, are miser's mattresses stuffed with the accumulated cultural savings of the country. The diversity of their sources is flaunted. It is in this guise of alternative guide to the American psyche that we present The Hall of Fame Hall of Fame.

Fame as a value, as a way of documenting success, underlies the entire network of halls. If we can gain access to the special personalities of the famous, who are the chosen in an almost Calvinist sense, our lives will be improved and enriched, or at the least stimulated or challenged. Fame is a sign that success is at a significant, rather than mundane, level. We don't experience someone else's fame, we participate in it. Attending halls of fame is the ultimate spectator sport. In a nation that hides from death, a hall of fame is a machine for suspending the life of the famous in his or her prime, as they would want to be remembered.

The hall of fame has an ideology parallel to the American myth that anyone can grow up to be President. The meritocracy is primary—with hard work to maximize talent, and a little luck, most anyone can be a hall of fame contender at some unnamed skill. The baseball hall may be out of reach but almost anyone can imagine being voted into the Accountants Hall of Fame. Belief is enforced in such democratic myths as fair elections, and that the vagaries of one's life are not relevant to a person's ultimate success. Such democratic sentiments are contradicted by the further message that, in fact, some of us are not born equal but are geniuses, innately superior, worthy of enshrinement. The religious connotation of the root word "shrine" is appropriate: doesn't sainthood amount to membership in the Catholic Hall of Fame? If an athlete's skills are special enough, he or she is elevated not just to membership on the team, but to the celestial confines of a sport's hall of fame, where those few who were one with the spirit of the game abide. The traits of being good and of being good at something are conflated. Popular culture thrives on its intimate connection to recent history and recognizable forms, especially in film hence the popularity of remakes and sequels—genre itself is about recall of form. The Hall of Fame Hall of Fame is in part also about how memory works, art works, in this case when located in an institutional setting. These places participate in the creation of history and a consensus of values in this country by determining what accomplishments are most highly esteemed, most worthy of permanent recollection.

Halls are emblematic of the American ethos that allows us to construct an identity, an image, a history of our own. Since most halls of fame profess to be more about personality than anything else, this self-creating process is oddly reproduced in their displays, in which we can examine how character, personality, and fame can be reconstructed using detritus and testimony. The drive to achieve fame, to make history, is an extension of this self-inventing aspect of Americana, and halls of fame canonize this system. It is intriguing to consider what the equivalent would be in a fine arts context. Can we imagine a museum that, like a hall of fame, contained nothing for which the person was famous—i.e., art objects—but was full of documentation of the art-making process? The maintained studios of deceased artists like Brancusi, opened for public visits, would be the closest concomitant.

In a hall of fame, a souvenir or memento is a reminder of an actual experience, and is a spur to completing such a memory through telling a story. In the art world, art objects claim many functions: formal esthetic ones, or, at their highest level, helping us become aware of how the mind perceives reality. However, art objects also can be understood as mementos that recollect for us the narrative of art history and our own education, our pasts. Whether in a hall of fame or a museum when we see objects repeatedly (or recall seeing them in the media, an additional layer of distance), our direct perception is altered by the memories and associations we have with every other time we have seen them, which inevitably are part of the machinery of our mental process of memory. Thus in perceptual terms at least, the gulf between an artifact–a greyhound skeleton–and art–a Muybridge photo sequence–diminishes when it is understood that they are both entangled in memory, thick with associations. It is precisely this point that we remember ephemeral connections between the varied things of this world that now come back in greater focus, insistent on being recognized, dumbfounding distinctions between high and low culture.