This was my 4th visit to this museum, and the firs...

This was my 4th visit to this museum, and the first since it has become the MoPOP. We spent about 3 hours there, but left disappointed. Despite being housed in a remarkable Frank Gehry designed building, the curation was unfocused. Everything there is pop culture as advertised, but there could be a little more selectivity of artifacts and better story telling. The place is vast while the number of exhibits is relatively small. Museums endowed with less square footage must select the most important and relevant items to illustrate the story, which creates focus. Here the curators adopted a more-is-more approach and attempt to fill the cavernous exhibit halls with a garage sale of unexplained and often uninteresting items. By doing this, the museum fails to elevate the subjects of its exhibits, but instead overpowers and diminishes them.

The Gehry architecture containing the museum (itself shaped like a guitar with the monorail as its neck) would be worthy of a self-referential exhibit. Ironically, little is said of the building despite these influences between pop culture and architecture. For that matter, you can't walk outside and look up at the Space Needle without wondering if it's 1960s concept of the future was influenced largely from the Jetsons cartoon series started about the time it was being designed.