What's All This Then?
This site is edited by Coudal Partners, a design, advertising and interactive studio in Chicago, as an ongoing experiment in web publishing, design and commerce. [Next]
What's All This Then?
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Tuesday Edition
If we weren't a design/ad firm, our second choice would be a
tv network in the early 80s. And this would be our network promo.
Coudal Partners
About
The MoOM is a part of the Coudal Partners site. Based in Chicago, CP is a small design firm with big ideas.
MoOM Mission
Welcome to the Coudal Partners Museum of Online Museums. Here, you will find links from our archives to online collections and exhibits covering a vast array of interests and obsessions: Start with a review of classic art and architecture, and graduate to the study of mundane (and sometimes bizarre) objects elevated to art by their numbers, juxtaposition, or passion of the collector. The MoOM is organized into three sections.
The Museum Campus contains links to brick-and-mortar museums with an interesting online presence. Most of these sites will have multiple exhibits from their collections (or, in the case of the Smithsonian, displays of items not on display in the Washington museum itself).
The Permanent Collection displays links to exhibits of particular interest to design and advertising.
Galleries, Exhibition, and Shows is an ecelctic and ever-changing list of interesting links to collections and galleries, most of them hosted on personal web pages. In other words, it's where all the good stuff is.
One thing you won't find at MoOM are collections of posters or maps. As particular interests of ours, posters and maps have their own departments in the coudal.com archives. Find them and be lost for hours. MoOM will be evolving each week, so if you have a link that you think belongs here, please send a note to "kevin at coudal dot com" for consideration. And enjoy the galleries.
BTW: The MoOM was featured recently on NPR's All Things Considered and selected as one of Time Magazine's 50 Coolest Websites for 2005. It was reviewed on The Voice of America radio show, Our World and received a nice writeup by Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell in the New York Times Circuits Section, another longer piece by Sarah Boxer in the NYT arts section and similarly kind attention from The Christian Science Monitor.
Special Feature
In honor of its recent renovation, we've assembled some information and a short film about the spiritual home of the MoOM, Crown Hall, at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
infrequent mail
The MoOM is updated exstensively each quarter. For a quick note when that happens and occasional contests and other stuff, enter your email here. We won't ever abuse the privilege. Period.
the Museum of online museums
Recently acquired but not-yet-collected exhibits, with descriptions, can be found in the MoOM Annex, a part of the general CP archives.
The Museum Campus
The Permanent Collection
Galleries, Exhibitions and Shows
† = Most recently added
Fall 2006
Whether or not you're a science fiction fan, you've got to love more than 650 Philip K. Dick book covers, collected by fans for his official site. As design trends change, and the stories pass through time and language barriers, it's astounding to see the variety of interpretations. In some cases, it's particularly interesting to see how the book design influenced the films derived from Dick's stories (most notably, "Blade Runner" and "Minority Report") and how the films influenced the design of later printings of the books.
Our ill-informed western stereotypes once led us to believe that drinking in the USSR usually involved a bottle of vodka and was consumed while wearing a fur hat as sad music lingered somewhere off in the distance. But all of us (except for Sarah Palin who regularly witnessed the truth from her kitchen window) couldn't have been more wrong, as the Collection of Soviet Wine Labels fills us in on the many varieties of vino communism had to offer. Stomped by the workers, casked by the workers, consumed by the workers. Lenin would certainly toast to that.
Fifteen years ago, when it was finally time for me to buy a car on my own, the first place I went was a Pontiac dealer. The reason, I knew fully well, was that bird on the hood of Burt Reynolds' Trans Am in Smokey and the Bandit, a movie I was obsessed with nearly as much as Star Wars back in 1977. Reason eventually won out and I bought a Honda Civic, but damned if I didn't drive that baby home, park it in the yard and drink a sixer of Coors while sitting on the pathetically undecorated hood.
Like film projectors, part of the attraction of reel-to-reel tape decks as objects is not just that they have a lot of moving parts, it's that you actually get to watch those parts moving. A digital progress bar doesn't hold a candle to the long, slow, hypnotic unwinding of a party tape from the left reel to the right. These vintage ads and manuals mostly appeal to the idea of being a "pro" in your home. That's a charming idea in the age of the amateur.
I don't know much about the series of novels about Simon Templar, aka "The Saint," but I do know a little about The MoOM, and one thing I know is that nothing makes for a more satisfying exhibit than a few pages jammed full of iterations on a single idea. Jean-Marc Lofficier's Saint Cover Gallery is exactly that. An expressive stick-figure placed in hundreds of situations by a group of inventive artists makes for a fun-to-browse collection that practically defines the idea of "variations on a theme."
