Punk ‘unscripted’: Las Vegas’s Punk Rock Museum and the politics of punk’s remembrance

This article examines the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, focusing on its development, curation and experience-based strategy. The argument is twofold. First, it argues that the paucity of contextualizing and interpretive narrative significantly limits the museum’s exhibits. The ‘unscripted’ approach to curation that the management espouses as a ‘punk’ alternative to didactic narrative, in turn, allows it to disavow accountability for the limiting ‘script’ implied throughout the resulting exhibits. This script largely centres on the US pop-punk that flourished from the mid-1990s onwards – a focus that reflects the musical predilections and social connections of the museum’s founders – rather than offering the more capacious survey and analysis of punk histories that might be expected at the world’s major punk-rock museum. Second, it argues that the museum’s ‘unscripted’ curation, informal social environment and prioritization of visitor ‘experiences’ mirror approaches familiar to the ‘post-museum’, potentially affording community and positioning patrons as creators of meaning. However, the non-contextualized, nostalgia-driven exhibits and experiential installations, along with the museum’s priority of catering to patrons’ enjoyment, serve to celebrate punk rock but do not seek to challenge visitors or to advance new insights into punk . These dynamics, I contend, derive from the museum’s limited framing of punk and the management’s strategy of situating the museum within Las Vegas’s tourist industry.