Artists Should Be Their Own Museums

email correspondence of Saturday, January 09, 1999

Our B and B ‘Casa del Artista’ in Cuernavaca, Mexico that housed the Ontological Museum exhibits (the studio and archives were in a different part of town).

The following is a 1999 email response to a conversation on the defunct Yahoo email group Fluxlist (now on facebook) that I wrote in my early 40s from Cuernavaca, Mexico containing some of my thoughts at that time about what became my long term (25+ years), overarching project: The Ontological Museum.
My thoughts on the topic have become more developed and more sophisticated over the years since the writing of the below musings and I intend to continue writing some articles to lay out my own thoughts on this subject as I contemplate the next steps in what to do with this massive accumulation of artifacts. More to follow…

Artists Should Be Their Own Museums - 1999

All of these curators are merely using artists' art as decorations of their own ideas. This is a complete subversion of their task and, in my opinion, represents a hostile take over of the public presentation of art. These institutions after all, are not what artists have come to assume that they are. We thought that they were places that advocate the arts and maintain a safe haven for the best works being created. This is wrong thinking.

Museums are the private endeavors of the wealthy that later, for a wide array of purposes, become 'open to the public' collections. The public then comes to assume that their holdings represent the best and finest examples of the periods that they cover but no, this is not the case. What they represent for the most part is whatever has come into their possession that they then promote. With enough promotion those works become widely known like pop music and are then assumed to be the crème de la crème. Not true ladies and gentlemen, just good advertising.

Additionally, all of these museum collections have generated a bunch of jobs that have become a profession, namely museum directors, writers, caretakers, publicists, archivists, curators, etc. These people are not artists but, due to a close proximity to art, have mistakenly come to think of themselves as arts professionals. They are not. A person has to actually be practicing some art form in order to regard himself or herself or be regarded by others as artists and the legacy of persons such as Duchamp (and his progeny) who have included comments and art on curation and archiving etc. have given an opening for these professionals to become confused and begin to regard their activity as art. You can't blame these youngsters for this as they don't know any better but we artists need to start thinking about how we are going to address these issues.

For one, I have been thinking to myself, "Why don't we artists just start establishing ourselves as museums. We don't run studios, we run self generating museums.”  Then we establish ourselves as such by building, buying or renting an appropriate 'public' space, dedicate a small part of it to exhibition space, a small museum store, a sign in front that says ‘museum’ on it, a couple of parking spaces and non-profit status so that we can apply for grants to archive and maintain and expand our collections of our own work and the documentation of our lives as artists or groups of artists.

What about that idea? I have been experimenting with this idea for the International Post-Dogmatist Group via the Ontological Museum pages on the ontologicalmuseum.org and collagemuseum.com websites and am currently about to move the museum into a building (next week) which will be the MUSEO ONTOLOGICO. It will also be my studio but that will be in the back rooms. I will have a sign made, I will hold public exhibitions, lectures and advertise it as the Ontological Museum of the International Post-Dogmatist Group.

From an email correspondence of Sat, 09 Jan 1999 to Aleksi Aaltonen