#1
The Museum Is Open
On beginnings, on what three paintings mean, and on what we are asking for
I want to be honest about what this is.
The Heterocosmic Museum of Art is, as of today, open to visitors. What you are looking at — three paintings, three universes, three artists who never existed in ours — is not the full museum. It is the proof that the museum is possible. It is what we have been able to build, carefully and without shortcuts, before asking anyone for anything.
The acquisition process is real. The Cyclorama, the Delta Problem, the theoretical framework that makes cross-universe retrieval possible — all of it is documented, all of it is in place. The three works currently in the collection were not chosen at random. Vermeer's cosmological painting from Earth-178 is here because it is the clearest demonstration of what this museum can hold: a work of art that belongs to a tradition you recognise, made by a hand you know, in a world where the question that hand was asking was entirely different. Van Gogh's self-portrait from Earth-339 is here because it asks what portraiture means when the body doing the looking has been rendered invisible by the history of its own universe. The Bowie from Earth-482 is here because it is, simply, one of the finest self-portraits we have encountered in any universe, and because it was made by someone who understood, in a way that very few artists in any reality understand, that the self is always a construction.
Three works. Three universes. One question, asked three times with three different answers.
The museum can hold more. It was built to hold more. What it cannot do, without support, is grow.
We are launching a Kickstarter campaign. What we are asking for is not money to start something. We are asking for money to continue something that has already started — to fund the acquisition of new works, the documentation of new universes, the expansion of the infrastructure that makes any of this possible. The goal is specific: to move from three works to thirty. To open the cinema floor, the library, the upper galleries. To make the Elsewhere operational for visitors who want to know what became of themselves in adjacent realities.
I am aware that what I am describing sounds, depending on your tolerance for the impossible, either like the most exciting museum project of the last century or like an elaborate fiction. Both of those responses are reasonable. I would only ask, before you decide which one it is, that you spend some time with the three works that are here. Read the documentation. Look at the paintings. Ask yourself whether the question they are asking — what was made, in a world where history went differently — is a question worth asking.
I believe it is. I have believed it for a long time. I am asking you to believe it with me.
The museum is open. Come in.
Support the museum on Kickstarter →
— The Curator