The most bizarre museums are created nowadays - for example, former President of France Jacques Chirac founded a museum in the small rural village (286 inhabitants) where he was born, in backwaters Correze, to display the gifts he received during his presidency, most of them deplorable kitsch. And it cost the French taxpayers all of €16.7 million ($23 million)!
Another example is the Cat Museum in Malaysia with more than two thousand items, including a mummified Egyptian cat, the perfect venue for cat lovers of the world! Or outdoors eco-museum, underwater art displays and indoors forestry museum. Or the Hiller Aviation Museum specialized in Northern California aircraft history and helicopter history (see picture). Not to mention secret agent museums and erotically subversive museums: there's a Museum of Old and New Art opening in Tasmania, dubbed as the "subversive adult Disneyland" for the whole of Australia. Founded in 2001 by Australian millionaire David Walsh, it underwent a $75 million renovation and was re-opened on 21 January 2011 with a lavish party attended by nearly 4000 guests.
Then, of course, there's a plethora of Modern and Contemporary Art museums, not only in the main capitals of the world but in medium-sized cities and even small towns. You're simply not "in" if you haven't got your MoCA museum. Every collector worth his salt dreams of founding sooner or later his or her museum. The first step is storage of the collection (always too big for a private home) in a warehouse, waiting for the upgrading to museal display. For politically well-connected collectors, the game is a lot easier. The example of Carlo Bilotti is a model every true collector should strive to follow: a retired Italo-American perfume executive from Palm Beach, Florida, Bilotti donated to the city of Rome in 2006 his collection of modern art, spanning from Dali to Warhol. To store and display it, the city promptly restored a lovely 16th century villa in the park of Villa Borghese (I wasn't able to discover at what cost - does anyone know?) Now the Museo Carlo Bilotti has become a must for art tourists. Rome has given him eternal fame. What more could you wish for as a private collector?
Much of Carlo Bilotti's collection is interesting - even if I'm neither a fan of Dali or Warhol - and it is, occasionally, a lively venue for contemporary art shows. But it is definitely, among the prestigious Rome museums, a very small one, a dwarf among giants, merely reflecting one man's taste and luck in finding art works.
Now does this really make sense? When I was a child, a museum was something serious: it was the repository of precious art work and/or of scientific knowledge and major discoveries. It brought together not one man's collection but many, not one man's views but that of the community as a whole. A museum acted as a general reference for intellectual and cultural life. It gave one a sense of belonging to a great civilization, it linked you back to your past. It was meant to defend and preserve a particular civilization's most important features through Time.
Going beyond the individual quirks of the ultra-rich who dream of having museums in their name, or of those who call museums what are nothing more than clever variations of Disneyland themes, there may be some honest attempts to create show places for historic events, like for example, the planned Museum of the Shoah in Italy. But are these really "museums" in the basic meaning of the word?
Shouldn't we start to use different words for such endeavours? Perhaps we could call them "Memory Monuments", or perhaps even invent a new term based on the concept of "showcase" or some sort of "dedicated space". For example, "Experimental Art Space" for a Contemporary Art Museum, because it is not really a museum: not enough time has gone by to decide whether the art is historic or not. But to have a place somewhere in town, supported by public funding and dedicated to artistic experiments and innovations, why not? Just don't call it a museum!
What do you think? Any ideas on how to call a museum that isn't a museum?
Comments
I like your idea of names like “Experimental Art Space”, but that would make me think that people could, in such a space , also experiment, hands on, with their own creations of art. I suppose the blame for such odd “museums” must, in recent history, be given to the States: in “The American Heritage Dictionary” it says a MUSEUM is “a place or building in which works of artistic, historical, & scientific value are cared for and exhibited.” So far that fits with what you said, but it also includes a Contemporary Arts Museum. Does it include a CAT museum? Maybe a cat museum could be artistic, historic and scientific – depending on if we are looking at a mummified cat from ancient Egypt, or a painting of a cat, OR a painting (ostensibly done) BY a cat: in the States in the ‘90’s there was a rash of cat painters, and a history of cat painters going back to again, ancient Egypt! In Latin a MUSEUM could be a library, a study or a museum; in Greek a MOUSEION or “a place of the Muses”. Maybe these days, the Muses are looking down and shaking their heads at us! We should be calling such innovative places SPACE TO MUSE ANEW or better yet, MUSE SPACE!
Sally de Mattia