New York City’s smallest museum
NEW York City’s smallest museum is not the collection of crap in your jacket pocket. The world’s smallest museum is Museum, a small space between Franklin St & White St in New York City. What you see is “absurdity or the beauty in the everyday”.
While it’s only open 16 hours a week, during the day on Saturdays and Sundays, the museum’s contents are viewable 24/7, lit and sealed by glass doors.
Passers-by are encouraged to call a toll-free number to learn about the 15 collections, comprising 200 objects, inside, including a series of Disney-themed bulletproof backpacks; U.S. paper money and coins so mutilated the Fed has deemed them unfit for currency, gathered by artist and writer Harley Spiller, a.k.a. Inspector Collector; a selection of objects from a fake Mars excavation; and personal items fabricated by prisoners, such as dice made out of bread, collected by multimedia artist Baron Von Fancy. Museum also offers several unique ways to experience the world: You can compare industrial designer Tucker Viemeister’s collection of toothpaste tubes from all over the map, or potato chip bags from various countries (collected by an eighth-grade class), as well as a globetrotting fake vomit collection. And that’s just the beginning.
Collectors Weekly talked with one of the museum’s curators:
In the current season, there’s a collection of toothpaste tubes from around the world. There’s a collection of mutilated U.S. currencies, money that’s counterfeit or real money that’s been scrawled on. There’s a collection from Alvin Goldstein, who was the founder and editor of Screw magazine, who shared with us personal belongings that have stayed with him throughout the narrative of his life. There’s a collection of Disney-themed children’s bulletproof backpacks. They’re things that touch upon something that’s happening in society, things that comment on where we’re at and how we’re thinking and what we’re doing
The picture above is of toothpaste tubes:
In addition to the odd or anachronistic thingamajigs that form this micromuseum’s “permanent collection,” a series of arty New Yorkers have lent their own weird stuff. The industrial designer Tucker Viemeister shares his amusing collection of toothpaste tubes from around the world, while the artist Leah Singer reveals the strange things she found on copy machines in New York City in the 1980s or thereabouts, including one pamphlet titled “The Chronic Masturbator’s To-Do List.”
View the museum’s brochure.
Posted: 20th, June 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
