Note: This post is part of my “Museums Project“, a collection of 200+ high-concept ideas for museums.
Not to be confused with the museums of Gaudi.
What’s In The Museum
The name says it all: we find really gaudy sh*t and put it in the museum.
I acknowledge that “gaudy” is a subjective judgment, but so is “art”. Most people know gaudy when they see it. And this museum lets them see it.
Paintings, furnishings, clothing, automobiles, architecture – ANYTHING that is gaudy is game.
I really like the idea of this museum because it’s attempting to target a very specific feeling. It’s sort of a disgust-at-design feeling. I imagine visitors going from one exhibit to the next with their eye on their personal disgust meter, wondering how the next piece will rank and how their friends will respond to it.
And of course we’ll put in some items for the those individuals that like to say things like “Actually that one’s not so bad. I wouldn’t mind wearing that.”
This is a museum that might be best crowd-sourced. Perhaps there is a website that people post stuff and other people comment on it and the museum decides to buy the piece or not based on comments and museum needs.
(Actually, maybe more museums should work like this. So many museums hoard countless works in their warehouse archives that will likely see the end of the earth before they ever see the light of day again. But that subject is for another post).
The details of the museum itself should be gaudy. The website. The front desk. The handles on the bathroom stall doors. The floor tile. The receipts of purchase. The clothes the docents wear. The seating. Everything. This isn’t a white-walled sterile museum. This is the gaudy museum.
There might be workshops on how to be more gaudy, how to make things around you more gaudy, and why gaudy matters.
The Gaudy Gift Shop
This place is going to be popular. It might have to take up half the museum. Loads of gaudy sh*t for you to buy, wear, and gift to your friends who have an ironic (or not) appreciation for gaudy stuff.
Gaudy being such a visual adjective will make the museum a very Instagrammable museum. Not on purpose. But ok, maybe a little on purpose. But not obvious. Chairs you can sit in, robes you can wear, items you can hold or stand next to.
Important Note
We want to steer clear of making this museum a criticism of an individual’s taste or work. The point is not to call out who owned it and how tasteless we think they might have been. Or who is the gaudiest person.
It’s about the gaudy piece itself. We can just wonder at its creation and at the fact that someone somewhere in this universe wanted to bring it into existence and then made it happen.
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