How a Museum can be Postmodern Artwork

In my opinion, there is nothing in the world more hateful than a gorgeously climbable object - a rock, or sculpture, or tree - with a sign in front of it reading, “KEEP OFF.” Why, oh cruel society, must you crush the dreams of our world’s children for the sake of preserving a material object? Does this suggest that the object’s only beauty is in its visual appeal? Why are we never allowed to explore other aspects of what might make that object beautiful, by clambering all over it?

As a kid with a particular fondness for climbing on things, imagine my complete and utter delight upon discovering the City Museum in St. Louis. I believe that the City Museum is a prime example of postmodern art - but before explaining why, let’s take a quick tour.

The name isn’t quite accurate; it’s not actually a museum, and it’s privately owned. The only way of describing it is as follows: imagine that a playground and a modern art museum had a baby inside of a ten story warehouse - and there’s absolutely no such thing as a KEEP OFF sign.

In the City Museum, everything is climbable. Literally everything - and there are a lot of things. For example: an airplane, a school bus hanging off of the roof, hundreds of feet of twisting tubes made out of coiled iron (dangerously narrow - there are seriously no safety precautions in this place) artificial caves filled with plaster dinosaurs, an indoor mini-skatepark, more hidden passageways than you can count (some were too small for me to fit through) and a ten-story slide. It is specifically designed to be the greatest playground in the world. It seems as if the creator took every single structure that any kid ever wanted to climb on, squashed it all into one building, covered this structure with mosaics and found objects, and opened it to the public.

To me, what makes the City Museum postmodern isn’t the actual structure itself - it’s what you’re supposed to do with it. It’s the most highly interactive work of art the world has ever seen. Everything could be considered abstract, but the entire building fulfills a purpose, which can only be carried out with the help of all the climbers. Without people actively enjoying it, the City Museum loses all of its meaning. A painting is still a beautiful painting when you’re staring at it from a distance and nodding to yourself - the City Museum would just become a pretty scrap heap. Similarly, if any safety regulations or “KEEP OFF” signs were implemented, the entire idea would lose its potency. What makes the Museum artwork is that it is unlike any other place on Earth in that it fulfills a desire within us all that nothing else in the world has bothered to fulfill.