Mmmmuseumm
The 100 Hours £10 note in MMuseumm
A couple of weeks ago in New York I discovered a truly brilliant museum. Housed in a disused industrial elevator in a distinctly unprepossessing street downtown, 'Mmuseumm' is the institution in miniature. The elevator is carefully lined with plasterboard to make it a classic white cube, and then with shelves covered with soft red velvet. To one side of the elevator, more shelves even cater for a tiny shop, complete with branded key-rings and pencils, and a coffee machine provides the Mmuseumm with its own cafe. It has a beautifully designed website and twitter presence.
Collectors can apply to have their own weird and wonderful sets of objects displayed in the Mmuseumm alongside its permanent collection, which includes such iconic objects as the shoe once thrown at George W. Bush. When I visited, collections included toothpaste tubes from around the world, defaced dollar bills collected grudgingly to pay a bet, objects made by or for prisoners, a silicon display of possible body-part piercings, and Chinese paper objects for funerals. Each shelf has a short text by the collector explaining the rationale that brought the objects together, and a reference book allows you to look up information on every object. It's a wonderful display of mostly everyday objects brought together in unusual patterns, which make you look at each afresh and with extra attention. I would like to start my own Mmuseumm in London!
My photo, you'll notice, features a ten pound note held in front of the Mmuseum. This seemed the perfect setting (especially given the collection of defaced dollar bills) to commemorate my month-long guardianship of the common object being used by a new research project with which I'm involved. 100 Hours is a material culture project based at UCL in which we each focus on 1 object, spending 1 hour together each month considering the object from a different perspective. Alongside this, we have a ten pound note as a group object to consider, and I was lucky enough to be guardian for the first month. Mmuseumm certainly got me looking at it differently. You can read my responses to the first 100 Hours sessions on the website, and I hope you'll continue to follow the project and add comments. You can add the mmmm to our 100 hours museum ...