Opinion: Smithsonian Should Rethink Building Another Museum

In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, a writer questions whether it is prudent for the Smithsonian Institution to introduce another ethnic museum—a National Museum of the American Latino—given that Americans are becoming increasingly multicultural.

Philip Kennicott says that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has seen its attendance steadily decline and wonders whether it is practical for the Smithsonian to build another museum to compete for limited resources.

Mr. Kennicott writes: “It seems likely that within a generation, the Mall could have a large collection of very quiet and not terribly relevant museums. Not because the stories they have to tell are irrelevant or uninteresting, but because the game changed. The appetite for history will be for complicated master narratives that cross lines between ethnic groups, that dip into technology and economics and art, and can’t easily be told in an old-fashioned, balkanized museum of ethnic identity.”

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