MeTube on "Lucy’s Legacy": Is This Any Way to Treat a 3.2-Million-Year-Old Lady? UPDATED

Here's my second video from the new CultureGrrl YouTube Channel. It's not appealing (like Glenn Lowry's star turn), but appalling. It's the most inane moment in the insipid installation of the "Lucy's Legacy" show is at New York's new schlockbuster venue, the Discovery Times Square Exhibition Center.

You enter a stygian tunnel to get to the famous (and truly impressive) fossil---your reward for enduring the inept exhibition that leads up to it. I promise you: I did not add the "am-I-really-hearing-this?" soundtrack to this video. This is truly what you'll experience if you dare to enter this corridor of gloom (and faux Ethiopian art). I wasn't permitted to photograph the real artifacts. But there was nothing real, only surreal, in this cheesy lead-in to one of the world's most treasured archaeological finds---the 3.2-million-year-old skeletal remains of Australopithecus afarensis:



I was almost alone in the "Lucy" show, save for the guards, so this schlockbuster was no blockbuster. Things were a bit less dreary and deserted, though, at the "Titanic" exhibition on the other side of the Discovery facility. That extravaganza provided visitors with a "you are there" feeling of being passengers on the doomed vessel.

When I'm back to blogging next week, I may go into greater detail about what's wrong with the Discovery Center's presentations. Or maybe it would be merciful to avert my eyes from this misconceived venture and stick to the real deal---serious museums whose shows are grounded in deep scholarship.

What I don't understand is that "Lucy's Legacy" did originate at a museum---the Houston Museum of Natural Science. I'd like to assume the presentation there was more professionally proficient than what I saw in the repurposed former NY Times building.

UPDATE: Lucy's just been upstaged by an older woman---Ardi (Ardipithecus ramidus)! Suggested new exhibition soundtrack: "Ob-La-Di, Ardi Da."