Kenneth Cohen
Appearances
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You want to go all the way back probably to the 1970s, if not earlier. The Smithsonian didn't consciously collect things that we would call pop culture until the 1970s. And then what happened in the early 1980s, as the small collection was starting to grow, was that the museum received a gift of materials from the TV show MASH. and staged an exhibit about MASH called Binding Up the Wounds.
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And so that exhibit, which had one of the surgery rooms and a bunch of the props, including the famous sign, hometown sign post that has all the characters' hometowns listed on it. This exhibit drew over a million people. It was the first time the American History Museum needed time ticket entry.
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And it really told museum and Smithsonian leadership that popular culture was an important part of American culture and that it needed to be preserved and interpreted and that the American public really wanted to see and engage with it. And without that turning point, it's hard to imagine the robust collecting that sort of led up to now.
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imagine that people really wanted to see that that much that's right you know people really connected with that program a broad cross-section of america really connected with that program and the show had the ability to turn on a dime from humor to really powerful reflection on the human costs of armed conflict and you know that really resonated with americans that the last episode of mash was
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you know, by percentages, the most watched TV show until the 2010s. So, you know, it really was a powerful program.
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How to Happily Overcome Clutter & Why Pop Culture is so Valuable - SYSK Choice
Well, they tell so many stories, right? There's the story in the movie and in the book that preceded the movie. You know, in the book, the slippers are silver and the path is gold.
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And there's a lot of conjecture about what the original author was intending in an era when the monetization, the discussion of how American monetary policy was going to be tied to gold or silver values was a really important political debate at the time the book came out. But the slippers have real relevance today, too, in sort of a real world crime sense.
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You know, the museum has had a pair of these slippers since they're actually red pumps. We call them slippers because that's what they're called in the movie. But we've had a pair since 1979 that had been on display almost constantly because of how popular they were. And there's five known pairs and probably at least six total because one of the shoes has a number six on the inside of it.
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And there were six different pairs of shoes, partly because they might get worn out over the course of all of the shooting, but also because the sequins are actually stitched on in slightly different angles that would reflect the stage lights in any given scene differently. And so they were used at different times in different sets in the filming of the movie.
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And so our pair had been on display almost constantly since 1979, and they were being meticulously cleaned by our amazing conservation staff. And at the same time that that was happening, sort of 2016 to 2018, a pair that had been stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota in 2005 surfaced.
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And the FBI brought those ruby slippers to the museum because our conservators were now so familiar with the intricate construction of the ones at our museum that they could essentially authenticate the pair that had just surfaced.
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Now in examining the pair that had just surfaced, the conservators discovered that in fact not only were the recently resurfaced ones authentic, but that our pair wasn't actually a pair. The right shoe at the Smithsonian and The resurfaced pair's left shoe were actually an original pair together, and then our left and the other pair's right.
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Conservators identified this by examining super small similarities in the cut style and what we call the wear, the patterns of distress caused by wearing the shoes on the sequins and on the heel of these ruby slippers. So this was a case of our collection, you know, being used to help safeguard another of these rare and super popular shoes that many Americans have really close connections to.
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Yeah, so it's interesting when people see our pop culture materials, they often say, oh, you have the, as if there's only one. And of course, in many of these cases with the ruby slippers, with Superman costumes, with all sorts of other things, especially costume items, there's often multiples. Sometimes they're exact copies and sometimes they're slightly different.
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the Superman costumes were stitched differently for different positions that Superman might be in so that the suit looked skin tight no matter what position he was in. So there was a quote unquote flying suit for when he was posted horizontally that would look skin tight.
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But if he stood up and walked in that suit, it would wrinkle and crinkle in certain ways that were unflatteringly visible on television. And so they had a walking suit and ours is the walking suit. So used by George Reeves. When he was walking around in character.
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We don't care about that. So yeah, I mean, you know, lots of people send us messages about items that they have, or asking us about items that we have. And we don't value our collections in that way. And so we don't really consider our collections from a monetary point of view. We're trying to take care of these things in perpetuity.
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Yeah, so the Babe Ruth baseball, some things in our collection, we don't have great documentation on. They come to us, we know they're important, but it's hard to sort of pin down precise details. So that baseball is, the signature is authenticated. It's certainly Babe Ruth. And it was either from 1918 or from 1921. And we know that because the ball came to us
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from somebody who grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and told us that Babe Ruth signed it when he came through Scranton, Pennsylvania, and he was really only in Scranton, Pennsylvania, playing baseball twice.
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And so once was after the 1918 season, when baseball players, Babe Ruth had just won the World Series with the Red Sox right before he would be traded to the New York Yankees and the Red Sox would go a very long time before they went again. And all baseball players after the end of the season were told they had to find essential work because World War I was still going on.
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The country was actually recovering from a flu pandemic in that year. And so many baseball players signed to play for factory baseball teams and claimed that they were doing factory work as part of their essential work. Babe Ruth signed with Bethlehem Steel, which was run by a guy named Charles Schwab, who's Name is familiar for all sorts of other reasons now.
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And so he played baseball for a factory team in a six-team league where each team represented a Bethlehem Steel-owned factory. Factory workers at the time complained about Ruth showing up at the factory in patent leather shoes, dress pants, and a silk shirt.
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But when he toured the region with a team, kids came running out as they still do not necessarily aware of the politics behind their heroes actions. One youngster in Scranton, PA got this baseball and he could have gotten it at that time or he could have gotten it in 1921 when Babe Ruth against Major League Baseball rules,
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organized a barnstorming tour of Major League Baseball players who played little town teams all across the eastern half of the United States in an early assertion of player rights at a time when baseball players were in a system that gave them very little in terms of rights to negotiate their contracts, ask for trades. There was no such thing as free agency.
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And so either way, whether this was in 1919 or 1921, this ball captures a really important moment, certainly in the life of the child who had this signed by their hero, but also in Babe Ruth's relevance to American history more broadly.
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So the answer is it can be either. Most of our items come from a donation where we do not pay. People think the Smithsonian is sort of loaded, but we're not. And so on the open market, especially today when you're talking about pop culture materials and the collecting market and the auction market is...
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like a runaway train, very few museums and cultural institutions can afford to pay open market prices for these items. So we try to get in touch with people before things hit the market and talk to them about our ability to preserve items and hold them for the American public in perpetuity for the future.
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And so most of our items are donated and then on occasion we are able to purchase things on the market.
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Oh, man. So that was, you know, before my time at the museum. It was donated in 1993. The guitar first appears in Purple Rain in the movie. And only after Prince's death, when the curatorial staff at Paisley Park, his home, came to the Smithsonian and wanted to determine the history of the example in our collection, because there are other cloud guitars.
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We took that guitar, we actually CAT scanned that guitar to look beneath the top layer of it and discovered that there are six layers of paint and that the guitar's body and neck were built by repurposing other smaller parts, some of which reflect the curves and lines of much older violins, like sort of 18th, 19th century violins.
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And so the guitar, I think, symbolizes Prince's ability to combine and repurpose styles to express his own unique individual identity. You think about his costumes that sometimes pull elements from the Edwardian era around 1900, right, with high collars and ruffled shirts that were popular actually even in earlier periods.
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and then he couples that with this electric guitar that keeps changing color and evokes late 20th century pop music but also violin scrolls from 200 years earlier the guitar i think is a statement about how we all pull from the past when we present ourselves today it's almost like the yellow cloud guitars prince's way way more innovative response to retro fashion you know it's you you want to bring back bell bottoms or high-waisted jeans come on here's how you make yourself timeless really
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Our Kermit the Frog is certainly one of the first ones, if not the first. Kermit the Frog sort of premieres in 1955 on a very short program called Sam and Friends that Jim Henson led. It was a five minute show on Washington DC's NBC affiliate station that ran in the evenings. There were all kinds of crazy characters in there. There was a snake named Icy Gunk.
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There was a French rat, spoke in a French accent named Pierre. You know, and so there were these little short segments of these guys sort of doing wacky things or having wacky conversations. The original Kermit has split ping pong ball for eyes. The green comes from one of his mother's discarded jackets. And there's a sleeve because sort of operated the early Kermit like a sock puppet.
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And the sleeve is made from a leg of Jim Henson's jeans. the muppets which evolved from salmon friends these are a group of oddballs um and and over time henson really became very conscious and intentional in embracing that characterization his shows become a lot about being accepted for who you are no matter what you look like
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It's a great question because, you know, I think the way entertainment museums have evolved, they often get viewed as sort of halls of fame where really what you're enshrining is the celebrity or the accomplishments of the performer, whether it's an athlete or a musician or an actor. And that's not how we go about building the collection at the Smithsonian.
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We are looking for things that sort of reflect broader American history. Now that might be an amazing accomplishment or achievement. You know, we also have a soccer jersey from the US Olympic soccer team in 1948 that lost by a larger margin than any other Olympic soccer team ever.
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because that item sort of tells a story about American history and the place of soccer and American culture in a particular point of time. And so the same sort of rules can be applied to the puffy shirt. I mean, Seinfeld, the show, often gets famously tagged as being a show about nothing, right? Have you ever, have you heard that? In fact, that comes from a line in the first episode
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The show actually, it's a misnomer because the show actually mined human foibles and frailty for like comic gold. You think about the puffy shirt for an example, it's about Jerry's hubris that episode really. He's trying to look the part of somebody famous when he goes on the Today Show. He's trying to be a big shot, right? And trying to make a statement.
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And the show was about people who make something out of nothing. The show wasn't about nothing. It was about people who make something out of nothing. The puffy shirt is a kind of way to say, stop taking yourself so seriously. And that's not nothing, right? Especially in the context of 1990s US history, the explosion of celebrity culture.
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The whole show, Seinfeld, I think, is really about striving so hard that you become a little self-centered and petty in really ridiculous ways that backfire in your face.
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Yes, we have one jacket, hat, and one of the bull whips. And you know, it's funny, Smithsonian folks actually don't like Indiana Jones that much. People always think our storage room looks like the one at the end of the first movie where the Ark of the Covenant sort of disappears forever. I assure you, we are much better organized than that.
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But Indiana Jones, actually like the Star Wars droid costumes in our collections from The Return of the Jedi, they're both really modern riffs on the old Western, you know? Harrison Ford was great at those roles, whether as like the blaster gunslinging Han Solo or as Indiana Jones.
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The Western in these stories are about individuals who fight evil, but they often usually have to overcome their own shortcomings in order to do that successfully. And in the 1980s, you know, that story gets projected in new ways as the United States emerges from the Vietnam era, the economic contraction of the 1970s.
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So in Star Wars, right, it's about Luke Skywalker and to a lesser extent, Han Solo's journey of self-discovery, helping them in their fight against the empire. In Indiana Jones, right, it's about, you know, sort of recalling the World War II era in which the line between good and evil was drawn much more clearly between Nazis and allied powers.
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In both cases, Indiana Jones and Star Wars reflect this conversation actually that George Lucas was having very consciously in his notebooks. He has notes about this conversation, very conscious conversation he was having with himself about sort of what the US could and should be as a nation.
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Thanks so much for having us, Mike.
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So, you know, it's interesting. When people see our pop culture materials, they often say, oh, you have the, as if there's only one. And of course, in many of these cases, with the ruby slippers, with Superman costumes, with all sorts of other things, especially costume items, there's often multiples.