The Best Museum in America

Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry has an offsite warehouse
in an undisclosed location, like most American museums. It’s not open
to the public, but I got in once. Basing my expectations for the
warehouse on MOHAI’s modest public exhibitions, I was astonished to
find instead a disorienting mass of two-story open shelving units
overstuffed with curiosities: a life-size, fiberglass cowboy named
Black Bart. Stick-on beauty marks from the late 1800s. Somewhere in
there, I’m told, is the skin of an unborn reindeer.

MOHAI’s public museum is currently in a transitional state because
the expansion of SR 520 requires the institution to move. New
facilities expected to open in 2012 will be larger and more dramatic,
inhabiting the Naval Reserve Building at Lake Union Park. But will the
museum’s approach and sensibility grow, too? Museums are not typically
progressive organizations—few that raise the massive funds needed
for expansion view the change as an opportunity to redefine how their
facilities and their presentations relate to their objects and
communities. Nobody’s asking for advice, but here’s some anyway: One of
the most relevant, overlooked models for museums today to consider is
that of the Neon Museum in Las Vegas—the best museum in
America.

The Neon Museum is not accessible. I learned of it on a blog,
followed a link to the museum’s website, and found that registering for
a tour in advance is mandatory; this became clear after I realized the
address for this place was not posted anywhere on its website. Once in
Vegas, I gave the cab driver the address. He started on his way toward
downtown with confidence but soon began corresponding back and forth
with dispatch, trying to determine a landmark near the museum. After a
long pause from dispatch, the driver said he thought he knew where it
might be and pulled onto the highway. Fifteen minutes later, I was
dropped off at an empty intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard.

Before me was the museum: two sandlots surrounded by a chain-link
fence. A tour guide waited across the street from the museum, offering
everyone water and an umbrella. No one took him up on it. The group
stopped in front of a gate wrapped in a massive knot of chains and
Master Locks. The neon signs protruded from behind the fence—the
head of a king, a pool player bending forward, horseshoe arches, dollar
signs—invading the otherwise barren downtown landscape.

The guide congratulated anyone wearing closed-toe shoes in
anticipation of the broken glass and metal throughout the grounds. He
mentioned the occasion when a visitor left requiring five stitches,
having backed into a piece in the collection while trying to take a
photograph. As we stood listening in the shade of the only tree in
sight, the error in the group’s collective refusal of the umbrella and
water became apparent; everyone was already drenched in sweat.

The nickname of this place is the Boneyard. The only building on the
three-acre premises is a half-constructed concrete clamshell designed
in 1961 by Paul Revere Williams, the first African-American member of
the American Institute of Architects, which will eventually house a
modest visitor center. But for now, there are no readily available
restrooms at this museum. There is no seating.

None of that mattered when the chains were unwrapped and we passed
through the narrow gap one by one. Cameras immediately came out of
pockets as we flocked to the nearest signs in sight: the Aladdin’s
silver lamp, the atomic letters from the side of The Stardust, the red
Golden Nugget sign used in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. These are
the fallen relics of popular iconography. In the Boneyard, they are
made authentic by the rust, scars, and broken light bulbs—the
messiness that’s absent not only from mainstream visual culture but
also from the flawless museum objects of the present. Their histories
are explained through the visual details that remain on their surfaces
and at our feet in the form of broken glass, rather than in extended
wall text and museum jargon.

American museums now follow formulas when creating the “visitor
experience,” usually amounting to the central location, high-profile
architecture, and ample seating that characterize today’s institutional
experiences. In the process of creating a comfortable and often
sterilized facility, the environment that allows objects to be explored
rather than just explained can be lost. Both MOHAI’s warehouse and the
Neon Museum evoke the traditional wunderkammern, or “cabinets of
wonder,” back to which American museums trace their origins. The
overpowering curiosity that comes with entering a space abounding with
unlabeled artifacts is a natural inspiration to look closely and to ask
questions, two tasks that mainstream museums spend large amounts of
time, money, and text trying to encourage in their 21st-century
audiences.

Yet the Neon Museum is more than evocative nostalgia in an
innovative setting. Building community—in a virtually nonexistent
one plagued by poverty, addictions, and governmental neglect—is
the larger idea behind the museum’s work. It has restored and brought
10 of its signs back into downtown, making them accessible to residents
and tourists at no cost and with no institutional barriers, as truly
public art.

The point is not that MOHAI, or any other museum, should simply drag
its oversized objects out onto the streets. At MOHAI, for example, the
Naval Reserve Building may offer a level of contextualization similar
to the Boneyard environment. Partially renovated warehouse spaces with
original architectural details left in place have provided attractive,
flexible spaces for contemporary art organizations such as MOCA’s
Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles. In this era of economic
instability, the Neon Museum demonstrates how an institution can grow
sustainably without the corporate largesse that may be hard to find in
the coming years—by returning to the smaller, simpler foundations
upon which museums were built.