The Museum of Real Things
A project in response to the question of what belongs in a museum and based on the concept that such public institutions are created in part to keep valuable and meaningful things. This periodically updated digital collection shares examples of things personally encountered on the secondhand marketplace, within personal collections, and wandering on the street that evoked a desire to preserve them, sometimes in an effort to not buy them.
(formerly operating as #thingsididntbuy)
“Those aspects of culture that are designed as valuable for collection are often at odds with what is actually valuable in daily life… If collecting is about the removal of objects to a hermetic context, then art that exists in the seams can introduce and remind us of all that cannot be preserved.”
quote attributed to Ann Hamilton in Art and Artifact
[shared by a friend, further citation unnecessary.*]
*The statement now exists as a new creation that stands apart from the original, errors and all.
Covid-19 snowman, Brooklyn NY, 2021.
Photograph of a photograph by Betty King Byrd.
From The Innocence of Objects by Orhan Pamuk
Layers, $3.00, Upper West Side Manhattan.
Estate sale, tri-state region, June 2020.
Box not for sale, Cold Spring, NY, 2020.
Corny lovers and reluctant radishes, embroidered by SCB, 2020 using a transfer pattern from Aunt Opal.
The Managerial Woman, Goodwill Chelsea, NYC, 2017
Betsy and Billy, personal collection, 2015.
Rag doll face patterns by Betty K. Byrd.
The High-Cost of Living, Philadelphia, PA, 2016
