Did you know there's a department of the Smithsonian dedicated to saving the sounds of the past? Old phone rings, coffee percolators, home movie projectors, and much more.
posted by braun_richard on Jan 11, 2005 - 20 comments

MoMA Free Tomorrow for New York MeFi Readers! Well, everyone, actually. The Museum of Modern Art in New York reopens tomorrow and graciously offers a day of free entrance for all. Your chance to avoid the much-criticized $20 admission (views: con, pro-fessional, mayoral). Even good old free-admission Fridays bear the price tag of aggressive name-branding [paragraph 6] by an image-crazy donor (it's not charity anymore if it's advertising, folks, much less design-heady classiness-by-association). Some reports (scroll) from the press preview.
posted by Joe Hutch on Nov 19, 2004 - 20 comments

London's Natural History Museum's subsite on Hair has some interesting movies and games.
posted by dobbs on Sep 3, 2004 - 3 comments

The Museum of Bad Art
posted by anastasiav on Mar 15, 2004 - 10 comments

"Listening Post," on now at the Whitney Museum, gathers conversational snippets from thousands of chat rooms and bulletin boards, structures them according to word counts, common phrases and other criteria and then displays them on a grid of more than 200 small rectangular electronic screens. Last week's New Yorker admired the resulting "found poems": "Duct tape and plastic for the White House duct tape, and water in the bathtub, eheh hmmm...."
posted by capiscum on Mar 11, 2003 - 3 comments

The IBM 1403 Printer (1964) playing music. This may change your life.
posted by the fire you left me on Feb 4, 2003 - 23 comments

The so-called Elgin Marbles A reminder that many of the objects that you love at your local museum actually came from a place in which they often have an even greater meaning.
posted by feelinglistless on Dec 6, 2002 - 38 comments

Got a taste for quasi-celebrity schadenfreude? Then glut yourself on the promotional materials of C-tier entertainers at the Hal Morris Museum. Care to slip down another couple of rungs on the ladder of fame? Have a look at the Celebrities of Real Estate. (thanks, Misterpants!)
posted by MrBaliHai on Feb 9, 2002 - 2 comments

The New McCarthyism This is so scary. It doesn't seem like anything more than intimidation, but, that's now. What will happen next?
posted by bas67 on Dec 19, 2001 - 32 comments

Speaking of Veterans Day, here in Chicago we have the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum. Art by Vets about the War. Most pieces are on-line with a short essay. The Above and Beyond memorial is impressive to say the least.
posted by skallas on Nov 11, 2001 - 2 comments

Botswana warrior returns home: An African warrior who was stuffed, preserved and put on show in a Spanish museum for more than 100 years is going home after a lengthy diplomatic dispute. . . . The figure was one of the town's chief tourist attractions. One local man commented that it was bit like sending all the mummies back to Egypt.
posted by palegirl on Jul 1, 2000 - 6 comments

The Bellingham Radio Museum is a neat find. Inside its sound archives are Real Audio recordings of some of the highlighs in radio history, including the Abdication of Edward VIII and Hitler's Speech after the Annexation of Poland.
posted by tdecius on Oct 30, 1999 - 0 comments