Life — April 22, 1886 — page 9: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Explanation for Modern Readers This satirical cartoon by W.A. Rogers depicts a futuristic "sewer" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the year 2000. The joke centers on early 20th-century urban sanitation infrastructure being preserved as high art—a commentary on society's tendency to romanticize and museum-ify even the most mundane or unglamorous aspects of modern life. Visitors in period dress examine the sewer installation as if it were precious antiquity. Signs advertising "baths" and commercial establishments suggest industrial-era commercialism. The satire mocks both the museum world's earnestness in collecting everything and contemporary obsession with progress and modernity. Rogers suggests that future generations will regard our current infrastructure with the same reverent bewilderment we reserve for ancient artifacts.