Not All Wet: This exhibition on a threatened resource may change the way you behave.

摘要

How do you design a museum exhibit around water? It's the linchpin of life, the foundation of civilization, the source of political clashing, a billion-dollar business. We study it, drink it, play in it, sell it, dam it, fight over it, and, above all, waste it. Given the vastness of the topic, it's fitting that the first thing you encounter upon entering the American Museum of Natural History's "Water: H{sub}2O = Life" isn't a dinky diorama but a giant wall of fog. A thin, rippling sheet of vapor serves as both an entrance curtain and a cool translucent display screen on which the word "water" is projected in big blue letters. Aside from being a dramatic stage-setter, it's an apt metaphor for the element's ubiquity and the confusion it inspires. "We all think we're familiar with water, and yet we're not," David Harvey, AMNH vice president of exhibitions, later told me. "The strategy was to immerse you in the subject in a very polite and surprising way."