There are many types of museums: natural history, aerospace, art, and architecture, among them. The best museums are those that do not try to do everything at once: the breadth and variety of human accomplishment are far too great. The Model T and Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon are both masterpieces, but they obviously do not belong in the same collection. It is doubly unfortunate, then, that the Hood does not have anything approaching the eminence of Ford’s or Picasso’s masterpieces and that the second- and third-rate pieces the Hood does have are indiscriminately jumbled together.

A room of classical European paintings by artists whom you (and most likely even the Art History professors) have never heard of stands next to a room of 10 pieces of Native Americana; a black-figure amphora by the Berlin Painter shares a room with Islamic art. And many of the pieces that try to pass for art are, more accurately, artifacts. Sometimes art and artifact can overlap, of course: an intricately-decorated aboriginal shield, a salt cellar by Cellini, and other objets d’art are more interesting than most contemporary art. But though you will find nothing approaching that level of craftsmanship in the Hood, you will find many, many simple cups, vases, and pots. The earthenware Atlantic Watershed vessels from Costa Rica are almost paintless, and their designs are not unique enough to compensate. The antique New England coffee pots—though many were wrought by famous silversmiths (Paul Revere among others)—are no more elaborate than the ones one could find on a table in the Hanover Inn.

Dartmouth’s collection of art and artifacts was born in 1772 when Reverend David Maclure found elephant bones along the Ohio River and donated them to the College. The museum itself was built in 1985, but had more rational minds prevailed, the Hood would not have been built at all. Instead of centralizing the collection and erecting this monolith of mediocrity, Dartmouth would have been better served if the pieces of the collection had been distributed to appropriate buildings throughout campus. The fine art would go to Carpenter, the home of the Art History department; the antiquities would go to Reed, the home of the Classics department; the Costa Rican artifacts would go to Silsby, the home of LALACs; and etc. I suspect that the then-administration’s decision to erect a Dartmouth museum stemmed from a desire to keep up with the Joneses. Dartmouth was the penultimate Ivy to get its own museum of art (Columbia was last). But, today, when every university from Princeton to Pomona has an art museum, Harvard and Yale are still the only schools with collections that are worth a damn. The Hood, like other “me, too” museums, is second-rate. The Hood does not have enough pieces, and the pieces it does have are sub par.

The reason for the Hood’s shortcomings is simple: lack of funds. Dartmouth simply does not have the type of endowment needed to provide the Hood with any great pieces. And of course there is the issue of audience. Ultimately, there is really no need for a Dartmouth museum. Dartmouth today is, as it was in Wheelock’s time, in deserto. Hanover is 6,000 well-educated people in the middle of nowhere. The Upper Valley lacks the art scenesters and the tourists who typically patronize museums. What good is a Vermeer if there is nobody around to appreciate it? For those who do appreciate Mondrian or Vermeer, Boston and New York are not too far away.

For all of its shortcomings, the Hood is worth a look—if only a quick look. The Hood has a Warhol (Mao Tse Tung – Royal Blue Face, Aquamarine Background) and a Rothko (Orange and Lilac over Ivory)--but if you have ever seen one Warhol or one Rothko, you have seen them all. The huge Assyrian reliefs of King Ashurnasirpal II are interesting and, pushing 3,000 years old, could be the oldest pieces of art you have ever seen. The Hood also has some very well executed neo-Classical small bronzes by D’Angers (Philopoemen) and Susini (Flying Mercury); Remington’s small bronze Bronco Buster is particularly novel as it employs classical sculptural form to depict a subject matter more common to Spaghetti Westerns. The New Hampshire landscapes by Doughty, Gignoux, Kensett, and Inness are among some of the best I have ever seen. In addition, there are also paintings by the American Masters Winslow Homer and John Singleton Copley, who is, for my money, the best realist painter America has ever produced.

The exhibitions are hit or miss. Last spring we were treated to two hits, “Rembrandt: Master of Light and Shadow,” a large collection of Rembrandt etchings (heavyweight art historian Simon Schama even came to give a lecture), and “Coaxing the Spirits to Dance,” a collaboration with the Met that featured some of the best Melanesian art one is likely to find north of the Equator. That being said, the prospects for this year are dimmer. There are upcoming exhibitions of the photographs of Serge Hambourg (who?) and Arctic Modern art that nobody is likely to see.

Ultimately, until the Dartmouth endowment hits $20 billion, the Hood will remain a diversion for deathly-bored undergraduates and anthropology profs who want to blow an X hour.