Kimmelman: New Paris Museum “Brow-snappingly Wrongheaded”

Paris’ new Musee du Quai Branly “simply makes no sense” writes Michael Kimmelman. “Old, new, good, bad are all jumbled together without much reason or explanation, save for visual theatrics. If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and arranged with hardly any discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. Colonialism of a bygone era is replaced by a whole new French brand of condescension.”