Online, Anything and Everything Can Be a Museum Piece

Hello again, NYT readers! “The age of MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, is over. The age of MoOM, the Museum of Online Museums, is upon us. In the 1960’s, deep in the age of MoMA, Andy Warhol painted a stack of plywood cubes to look like Brillo boxes. That was the end of art, the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto proclaimed. He didn’t mean that after Warhol there would be no more art, but rather that anything could be art… The Grocery List Collection (www.grocerylists.org) is compulsive reading. Among the 700 shopping lists is one that includes ‘potoes, chese, pease, smokes.’ My favorite is a short list scrawled on the back of an envelope with a return address of Christ’s Gospel Fellowship, Spokane, Wash. Under the words ‘Urgent – Needed’ are ‘knife sheath,’ written in red ink, then scratched out and replaced with ‘hatchet sheath.'” (Here’s the link to the New York Times story by Sarah Boxer.)