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A new work, never before published, Museum Legs is an irreverent and witty but also warm and engaging collection of essays—ranging from "First Friday" (a visit to museum parties) to "Revenge of the Homunculus" (a word or two about wall labels).  The essays culminate in "Dumb, Basic Ideas" for what museums might consider doing differently and "Crib Notes for a Museum Visit" (on-the-ground suggestions for museum-going).  The larger, embedded political idea—that boredom is a proxy for disenfranchisement—leads to the real question, not just of how people go to museums, but of how people have a sense of art in their everyday lives, what that art is, and who is making it in the first place.

The project started as "why my friends get bored in art museums and why that matters."  The reason it matters is that museums are an insulated judiciary in a larger visual culture.  The reason people were getting bored or tired was that what museums are doing now—competing with movies and amusement parks and competing with leisure activities—is to the side of their higher purpose. No matter how much you shine a strobe light on a van Gogh, it won't be a reality television program.  Relative to the leisure industry—and the fact we live in one of the most visual cultures of all time—museums are a little like the person on the soccer field who is going to where the ball is instead of staying open for the pass.

Project Notes:
The author has an MFA and MBA and years of work experience in art museums.  The project exists currently as a full-length manuscript.  It is estimated that two additional chapters would be written.  The author is particularly interested in finding a dynamic and talented editor to help shape the final work.

The Project Team (Contact ):

• Author & Project Manager: Amy Whitaker
  
• Editor: apply
• Publicist: apply
• Designer: apply
• Bookstore Sponsor: apply

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"[O]ne doesn't want to insist that the conceptualist movement is without point. It may, indeed, be heralding the complete collapse of art into philosophy. Several possibilities suggest themselves. Perhaps we should now leave art to philosophers who would seem to be, on this thesis, especially well suited to the tasks of "framing propositions," "advancing investigations," "initiating inquiries," etc. Or perhaps we should recognize that a Hegelian dialectical apocalypse is coming to pass, and that the apologia pro vita artis conceptualis documented in this anthology signals the death of art." --The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1974

Artist and author, Ursula Meyer originally wrote and edited Conceptual Art in 1972. Though reviewers of the time were convinced neither of the budding movement's viability, nor of Meyer's analysis of it in her introductory essay, they did concede the book's value as a "small, cheap, portable museum" of post-object art as it captured the conceptual work of some 40 different artists of the time. 25 years after its original publication, Conceptual Art has establish its place in the canon, Meyer's thesis endures, and only the book itself has fallen (needlessly) out of print.

Thanks to artist Alex Klein for reminding us of Meyer's book in her essay "Remembering and Forgetting Conceptual Art", posted at Words Without Pictures, April 2008.

Project Notes:
For this project, contemporary artist, professor and author Owen Smith proposes: "updating and expanding the basic project as it is concerned with presenting and documenting the forms and nature of conceptual art.... the basic idea is to create a contemporary version of the book in which updates or analogs of the past work in contemporary form are gathered and presented in an homage to Meyer's classic edition."

The team could potentially produce this project in two separate volumes (one classic, one new);  or as a single, bound volume with the texts interspersed; or in a single volume of only the new text, subsequently packaged with vintage copies of Meyer's original. One of the first tasks for the team will be to contact the author's estate to determine copyright status and seek their approval of the project.

The Project Team (Contact )

• Project Manager: Krista Molnar
  
• Editor/Author: Owen Smith
  
• Publicist: apply
• Designer: apply
• Bookstore Sponsor: apply