suggested donation » personal collections

just in time for beach season

Andy Van Slyke — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:17:25 +0000

An encyclopedia of novelty & variety performers & showfolk.

Fat Folk, “Ethnic Curiosities”, Hairy Folk, Her or Him, Giants, Circassians, Bearded Ladies, Thin Men, Wolf Boys, Crab People, and More!!!!!!!

fans in a flashbulb

Andy Van Slyke — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:32:03 +0000

Great vintage photography site, Fans in a Flashbulb.

Featuring:
45 RPM
The Butchers of Fort Greene Place
Let’s Eat

and more!

cover me bad

Andy Van Slyke — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:48:01 +0000

This one’s too easy, and it ain’t a museum or a library, but we’re filing it under personal collections, as we tend to do with weird galleries and such that we find around the webs. The Worst Album Covers.

We want to have a stuffparty sometime, for the record.

curated by michael jackson

Andy Van Slyke — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:20:22 +0000

MJ is auctioning off his goodies! There is so much for sale that its being held in a former department store.Here is a brief sample of the collection of the King of Pop, via the NYTimes.

museum as retail

Andy Van Slyke — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:49:12 +0000

Here’s a new one: a revolving online collection and gallery of old paperback books, hosted via Etsy. They are for sale, of course, and as one leaves, a new book replenishes the gallery. A neat idea, by a seller named Librarycopy.

We stand on the shoulders of midgets

Andy Van Slyke — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:03:57 +0000

The Museum of Folly (MoFo) is our favorite new Fake Museum (aka Online Museum aka Blog as Museum). A droll celebration and catalogue of FAIL, they recently relocated from the basement of a civic parking garage to a starchitect-designed mega-facility, housing their collection of 2,639,934 objects. We are proud to announce that a public-private partnership funded the buildings.

Highlights from the collection:
+ Golf Ball, 2008 (Found in the rough and once struck by Andrew Giuliani)
+ Picasso, Les Demoiselles dâ€™Avignon, 1990s (Reproduction, written up as a great work of art by an “Art Historian” seeking to quantify significance by counting text-book reproductions)

In their own words:
The Museum of Folly is widely recognized as the worldâ€™s foremost museum dedicated to educating an international audience about the contributions of clowns, jesters, oafs, and fools to the art and history of idiocacy, wrongheadedness, farce, and foolishness.

We would like to nominate our crummy webhost, lunarpages, whose servers were down for a while yesterday, for accession to the Museum. Perhaps we could donate some of the strands of hair we pulled out to the collection.

collecting what museums and libraries don’t

Andy Van Slyke — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:16:13 +0000

For collectors whose collections will never see the hallowed halls of a museum but just might interest someone on the web, there’s the Public Collectors project. We’re in like with this smart, simple site, which has its share of weird and ‘why-would-you-ever’ collections.

Our favorites from the digital collections section:
Face Painting Options in Mexico City
Documentation of Childhood Graffiti From Antique Sources
Documentation of Bibles Stolen From Hotels

MoTA, Stick Around!

Andy Van Slyke — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:25:53 +0000

We dig the Museum of Temporary Art, an at-home curatorial project which catalogues objects in 33 compartments of a small box. From what we gather, as new objects come in, old ones leave the Museum. Items are properly accessioned, it seems, and there’s an open invitation to contribute.

We particularly like Liberty in a Bottle, Sealed Nurse, and Headstone Tribute to John Dolis (RIP).

Are the links temporary, too?

more excuses to say “the orient”

Andy Van Slyke — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:49:58 +0000

While we’re at it, we thought we’d link to this interweb “Museum” of Olde Asian Commercial Arte. The Old Orient Museum has all the things we hate about an internet Museum–a flash interface that prevents saving images and any other 3rd party archiving, embedded sound that starts automatically, you get the idea–but some of the images are neat in a kind of late 90s kitch kind of way, and we appreciate the efforts of the collector and restorer, regardless.

Also, with this soundtrack, we kind of feel like we’re in a lesser David Lynch project. Warning: do not go to the about page with the sound on. And that is all.