The word “museum” conjures a specific image: a structured space with defined purposes—research, collection, preservation, interpretation, and display of tangible and intangible heritage. Yet, does a museum necessarily have to be a place? Language, too, can function as a museum. A book, as an archive of words, becomes part of a library, an idea Borges explores in The Library of Babel, imagining an infinite collection containing all past and future texts. The act of archiving predates the Industrial Revolution; kings and individuals curated their collections long before museums were formalized as public institutions.
A museum is not just an archive or an exhibition—it is a reference point, a site of interpretation. But does it have to be a physical space? Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Suitcase) challenges the idea of museums as institutions. This portable archive, containing miniature reproductions of his works, embodies curatorial intent: Duchamp selects, organizes, and defines his own collection, transforming the museum into a conceptual entity. The Boîte-en-valise echoes Renaissance cabinets of curiosity, a tradition also explored by Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, who turned her sorrow into a series of personal archives reflecting her time and pain.
A museum requires engagement. The audience should not passively consume curated narratives but rethink what constitutes a museum. YouTube, the Internet Archive, or even a family photo album can function as museums. When viewers recognize this shift, they adopt a new way of perceiving archives and their significance.
The Anti-Museum: Resisting Museumization
Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus critiques the dominance of Freudian psychoanalysis, which reduces all interpretations to the Oedipal complex. Similarly, museality is not just about physical institutions but the process of selective interpretation and representation. Museums preserve history but also act as gatekeepers, controlling narratives through curation.
Gatekeeping is inherent to museums: curators decide what to include, shaping historical and cultural memory. Institutions restoring analog films, for example, preserve visual history but also control access to it. Platforms like YouTube moderate content, just as Duchamp excluded certain works from his Boîte-en-valise. Even personal collections function as unconscious archives—someone curating Funko Pop figurines reflects personal taste but also engages in a selective process.
Gatekeeping determines what is presented and what remains unseen. The IDFA Documentary Festival 2023 exemplifies this: amid the Israel-Palestine conflict, the festival supported specific viewpoints, leading some filmmakers to withdraw their work. Every discourse operates within a gatekeeping framework, intertwining with power and ideology.
The Anti-Museum as a Counter-Strategy
The anti-museum challenges traditional curation by resisting selective preservation. It aligns with copyleft principles, advocating for unrestricted access and non-hierarchical archiving. Museums, paradoxically, can betray their own purpose—originally intended for preservation, they can become instruments of exclusion. The anti-museum counters this by decentralizing curation, ensuring archives are not dictated by institutional or personal biases.
However, the anti-museum remains idealistic. Humanity has long been inclined toward ownership and categorization, making it difficult to conceive of preservation without control. This is evident in video game history—without digital piracy, many classic games would be lost, as there is no institutional effort to archive them properly. Instead, companies prioritize commercial remakes, subtly erasing original versions, much like how Disney periodically “vaults” its classic animations, replacing them with modern remakes.
This is not about nostalgia versus progress but about the museal mindset, where protection shifts from preserving content to safeguarding brands. For younger generations, Aladdin is now a CGI-laden live-action film rather than the hand-drawn animation of the 1990s. This is not just historical preservation—it is controlled reinvention.
Human survival depends on both preservation and storytelling. Yet, as the saying goes, those who fail to learn from past are doomed to repeat it. Striking a balance between archiving history and narrating history is essential. The anti-museum does not seek to abolish preservation but to disrupt its monopolization, ensuring history remains a shared, evolving discourse rather than a static, institutionally sanctioned narrative.
Avesta Mahmoudvand
For the full text, refer to the book “Entertainment in Public” Project.
