You are about to listen to an imagined conversation between the hanging blue whale model and a living whale in the ocean--- enjoy.

Living Whale: Hey—it’s another one of us! It’s good to see you, sister. There are so few of us left in the ocean these days. A familiar face is always a comfort.

Model Whale: Ah, sorry to disappoint. I’m just fiberglass and polyurethane, hollow on the inside. But I’m happy to chat if you’re feeling lonely.

Living Whale: You’re hollow on the inside? No wonder you can hang from the ceiling like that! No amount of swimming would ever get me in shape for that. Still… you look kinda real. I even see you’ve got a belly button.

Model Whale: I do, thanks for noticing. I actually didn’t always have one. I’ve been hanging here a long time, they put me together up here in pieces. They left and let me hang here with all these people walking underneath for decades but something always felt off. 

Then one day, all the talking people cleared the hall. A crew came in on big lifts—they reshaped my tail, flattened my eyes, changed my blowhole coated me in the stinkiest paint imaginable. Twenty-five gallons of it. And the finishing touch? They added a belly button. I guess I wasn’t “right” before.

Living Whale: Sounds strangely familiar. Humans get a lot of things wrong about us.
But what I really don’t get is why they put you in the sky. They can resculpt your tail to be more accurate but still forget you live in the sea?

Model Whale: Well, humans can’t hold their breath very long. And they don’t need me to breathe either. They want me to be seen—to be wondered at. All day long, people stand beneath me, staring up in awe. 

Living Whale: So you’re just here to be looked at?

Model Whale: I inspire wonder.

Living Whale: With answers like that, it’s really starting to make sense that you’re hollow.

Model Whale: Alright, alright. But it’s not just about me. They say that wonder I inspire will lead to care of us. And care leads to action. That’s the hope, anyway.

Living Whale: But for years, you didn’t even look like “us”. Things were way off. How can they use you to inspire wonder about me—when they were showing people something I’m not?

Model Whale: That’s how museums work. They build knowledge out of fragments. Bits of data are turned into authoritative knowledge and sometimes they get things wrong. 

Living Whale: Then maybe they’re not just building whales… they’re building stories about whales. Ones that say more about them than they do about the sea.

Model Whale: That’s a good point. I hope visitors start to read me like a story—
not as a version of you, but as a story about how the museum, and people, think about both of us.