52 Museums
This year’s big New-Years-Resolution project is: I’m going to at least 52 museums through the year. This isn’t like, a generative design project or anything: it’s just a good excuse to go to all the museums I’ve been driving by and not making the time for.
The world is full of fascinating-sounding places, especially if you have a high tolerance for weird and/or boring. I certainly do, and there are really weird and/or boring-sounding museums in the area where I live, but I’ve never made the time to get myelf to:
- the Stagecoach Museum
- the Deaf Culture Museum
- the Hair Art Museum
- the Money Museum
- the Agricultural Hall of Fame(!)
These all sound like they’d be cool, right? Right?
I LOVE museums, and think that really anything that has been paid sufficient attention to can be interesting. And that’s the crux of a museum, right: some collection of objects, collected by somebody who was very into this thing. That attention, all focused on some thing is kind of interesting in itself, and the formal qualities of a museum (objects on display, explanatory cards, self-guided rooms, etc) really throw me into an automatic state of ‘why is this interesting?’ Maybe that collection or area of attention is big and obvious, like Modern Art or Natural History. I love those. But maybe it’s not, like the Toby Jug Museum or Leila’s Musem of Hair Art.
SO: in 2022 I’m going to at least 52 museums: one per week. And of course, documenting the process at museums.mattkirkland.com.
And of course, I’ll drag the family along to any that I can.
