Design Observer :: Join the Discussion http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/the-museum-of-communicating-objects/36588/ en-us Design Observer Group 2012-10-07T07:15:51-05:00 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0 Wunderkammer.) One might just as validly consider the project in relation to the tradition of literary illustration, in which context it might seem boldly original rather than derivative. The museum is a hybrid.

Precious? I think you would have to say more about what you mean by that. What would a non-precious project on this scale look like? Or is the mere idea of undertaking such a project precious? One could say that about so many cultural ideas and projects pursued with an obsessive attention to detail. The question for me is: does it work in its context? Obviously I think it does, but you would need to go there to decide.

“Pretentious” suggests he’s making some over-large claim that the museum doesn’t fulfil. Again, the only way of deciding whether that’s so is to experience the museum as a totality in its neighborhood — a neighborhood dense with junk shops and antique shops from which these objects have been sourced (see my previous post about the museum). Anyone who finds old objects and found images a source of fascination is going to have a field day in The Museum of Innocence. For non-Turkish visitors, the contents of these boxes also provide intimate and revealing glimpses of a society and culture that may be unfamiliar.

In The Innocence of Objects, Pamuk discusses the long gestation of the project in the most direct, personal and unpretentious of terms. The tone of the writing is quite different from art writing and he makes no attempt to “theorize” his creation. He writes as a novelist interested in social history, in the emotional lives of his characters, and in the way that objects can become charged with associations and memories.
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