My MASS MoCA Reflection

I had such an amazing experience at MASS MoCA. Being able to walk around all day through an art museum with such amazing pieces of art all around, with so many different interpretations and meanings behind each piece was awesome to experience. The Plastic Bag Store was also a great experience, and I would say that in some ways the store was effective. The amount of time and creativity that was put into the store was definitely worth it, as I believed it portrayed one of the most important things right now, climate change. While the Plastic Bag Store used humor to convey climate change, as the store was making fun of companies and capitalism, it was also conveyed as a serious problem in the present day, as plastic is destroying the environment. What really put into perspective and showed how crucial climate change is was when we got to walk into the plastic bag “ice” room, where the room was filled with plastic bags. I thought it was amazing but also quite depressing, as this is something that is happening, and the outcome from the films they showed could very much be realistic of what can happen if we keep using plastic for everything. The UN resource backs up this claim as “five trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year” and how “plastic items never fully disappear; they just break down into smaller and smaller pieces”. From the films and the support from the UN resource, plastic will continue to destroy the environment, which could cause permanent damage to our ecosystems and humankind. 

             While I believe that the Plastic Bag Store was most definitely an efficient way to depict climate change and the overuse of plastic, there are definitely some downsides/things to adjust to the store to communicate the downsides of this global environmental crisis. Because the Plastic Bag Store uses humor to depict this crisis, it may possibly take away some of the importance of this crisis happening right now. I feel like there could be some other ways to create an idea such as the Plastic Bag Store, but showing more importance, or the facts of climate change. I could possibly see the reasoning for the downsides of the store, but I feel that the idea of the store was very intelligent. I feel like I gained more knowledge from the Plastic Bag Store compared to the UN source, as while the UN website gave detailed information on plastic and how it’s affecting the Earth, I feel that experiencing some parts of it in real time gave me a much better understanding of this crisis. I think that when humans see numbers like “Today, we produce about 400 million tons of plastic waste every year”, you can’t actually process and fully understand that number, but when you see large amounts of plastic with your eyes, it is so much easier to understand the problem with plastic. One other exhibit of MASS MoCA that I felt related to one of our Global Studies themes was the exhibit “Like Magic”. What I really liked about this exhibit was how I didn’t understand it at first. What the exhibit is about is how the technology isn’t used for “magic” and is rather used for tools to help survive in the world. I believe the point of the exhibit is to resist the systems that try to control people's lives, that are often controlled because of their race, etc. Because I didn’t understand the exhibit at first, it really gave me interest in it, and now knowing what it’s about, I think that it is a beautifully designed exhibit.