Velvet ropes, motion detectors, and glass boxes begone!
Anne‘s “Take One / Leave One” exhibit at the New York Museum of Arts & Design (MAD) allowed visitors to both contribute and bring home objects on display. Check out the full article about the event here, published today in The Atlantic.
Here’s a snapshot of items deemed museum-worthy by the public:
The curators hoped serious artists, designers, and crafts people, “who have been waiting to be collected by a museum,” would bring their artwork to MAD. But they also were excited by more random possibilities. “I really wished someone would have taken off their bra and left it there,” Quito says.
No bras were recorded in the log, but there are a few delightfully curious transactions among the 150 people who participated and who were asked to fill out a donation card with title, date, artist’s name (if known) and personal notes. Murray Moss, a well known design entrepreneur, left a vintage red star pin with a photo of the baby Lenin. Someone left a Chilean satirical newspaper with Barbie on the first page and took the donkey mask. A young boy left a pencil from the MET gift shop in exchange for a paper sculpture by a visiting artist at the MAD Museum. Another visitor swapped a Library card from Maryland for a urine test kit. Then there was a faulty iPod with “Superior Music” exchanged for a broken “10:15:37 cat o’clock” (a broken watch). One visitor wrote in the log: “Entry: I TOOK: ‘a look’ I LEFT: ‘happy.'”