So for a couple years now, I have been following the controversial opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky (just across the river from Cincinnati). My good friend Sean Miller, director of the John Erickson Museum of Art, proposed that I do a show for one of the museum’s location-variable galleries, that would somehow take in the phenomenon of alternative natural histories via Biblical literalism. Sean is a pretty brave guy, and while I have been keen on the project, the prospect of vexing the famously well-armed and bellicose security staff at the museum has put me off it for a bit. Besides, funding seems to have run dry.

Well, now Vanity Fair’s A. A. Gill has a scathing review (hat tip to Pharyngula). He does the dirty work so you don’t have to. There’s even a slideshow with lots of pictures.

The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do.

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