Pitches for New Museums
1) The Interactive Museum of Social Media: Replica suburban bathrooms for mirror pics and accidentally leaked nudes; stables of cats for use with a hi-tech gif/meme station; guides trained to act as old friends and ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, trying to “reconnect” with museum patrons who have long since moved on; replica living rooms where people can “do” things (listen to songs on Spotify, read interesting newspaper articles, cook exotic pastas) while simultaneously broadcasting their doing these things to other museum-goers; small, hidden enclaves where museum-goers can covertly watch other museum-goers they find interesting, or through mirror technology watch themselves watching and feel pathetic, think ‘how has it come to this’; exhibits dedicated to Kanye West’s Tweets and dudes who ‘like’ the Facebook pictures of women they do not know; a computer lab where musuem-goers can GChat about how bored they are; maybe, if we can afford it, a machine that can calculate exactly how much time you’ve wasted on social media platforms, and can then, based solely on your fingerprints and interests on Facebook, determine the various other productive ways you might’ve spent that time.
2) For the last twelve years Darryl Bradway, high school history teacher, has been hoarding the tiny ripped notes passed from student to student in his 6th period class. These notes—primary documents in black and pink ink of 21st century malaise, guile, and hate—would be displayed alongside collages depicting just what the author of, say, “I can’t believe no one’s realized I just farted” has been doing since donning his mortarboard and walking the plank into a world less than hospitable to most forms of human life. Maybe a sort of high school cafeteria, in lieu of your usual museum cafe? I’m thinking puke-green walls, a dead-eyed, abusive lunch lady, maybe (if budget allows) a perpetual atmosphere of terror and distinctly sexual confusion. (One possible way to achieve this effect: Hire a dozen or so athletic and/or buxom young Americans to sit at a table in the center of the room, and maybe have them (through either mean looks or outright verbal abuse) ask museum patrons what possibly could have given them the impression that they were cool enough to sit in this particular cafeteria, especially with a sweater as lame as that, what, you couldn’t afford a nicer sweater, etc.)
3) You do not need me to tell you that physical books, with their many hundreds of burdensome pages, are on the outs. The public has spoken, and they want their words on screens, preferably tiny ones. My suggestion, then, to preserve those rascally dust-attractors? A sort of book museum: We assemble a small, representative cross-section of books people might be interested in reading, and allow our patrons to peruse them, either reading them in provided chairs or—and here’s where things get tricky—borrowing them, perhaps with a special membership card (starting monthly rate: $700). Crazy but, if properly executed, potentially groundbreaking.
