The Musée des Refusés prompts the students to question the collector and the collected, question their motivations, cultural, political, social context that justifies their collecting. The objective is to set out new practices, redefining new collectables and infer the new contexts where these museums would be set. The project has been written in collaboration with Laura Potter and Terry Rosenberg to launch the new Goldsmiths MA Design Expanded Practice programme.

To introduce it, we have organised a series of events, including a conference on the subject.

The archetypal museum is a concretization of the Enlightenment ‘knowledge project’. It is a storehouse of knowledge; gathering examples, categorising and classifying them and defining a field of knowledge and practice. This archetypical museum is a place to collect, preserve, interpret, and display items of artistic, cultural, or scientific significance (a) for the edification of publics, (b) as resources for the contemplation of ‘expert’ communities and/or (c) to act as a safety deposit to preserve things that have been deemed to be of cultural and historical importance (who deems them ‘important’ is a moot matter).

PERSPECTIVES
CATHERINE INCE  Rationales for Refusal
DEE HALLIGAN  Museum Says No A Strategist’s Take on Reasons Museums Don’t, Can’t or Shouldn’t Acquire
OLI STRATFORD  The Amazing Collapsing Journal
KRISTINA RAPACKI  The Museum of Failure

ALTER MUSEUMS
ALEXANDRA MIDAL  Ho(l)me(s) Sweet Home Design and Serial Killing at the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution
MATTHEW PLUMMER-FERNANDEZ  Your Output My Input
CARL CLERKIN The Learned Society of Extra Ordinary Objects
MAKI SUZUKI  Do You Want Me to Give a Guided Tour of My Wallet, Then?