Here's another one:
The esoteric is something that I appreciate in my grifting. It is no wonder then that Sir John Soane's Museum is one of my favorite places in London.
Again, like the Moreau Museum in Paris or even the Gardner Museum in Boston, the space is a living quarters cum museum of an eccentric individual that has been preserved by the state and opened to the public for viewing. Four years before his death in 1837, Soane established the museum through an Act of Parliament. As stated: "Keep it as nearly as possible in the state in which he shall leave it." He did however regulate that the museum was to be closed initially to guests during 'wet or dirty weather.'
Who is Sir John Soane? He is regarded as one of England's great neo-classical architects. He made the late Bank of England and the Dulwich Picture Gallery amongst many other projects. The house/museum itself is a collection of three Holborn townhouses that Soane amassed into his private living quarters and studio. The inside is a nest of small interconnected rooms that are littered with thousands of framed images, marble statues and of corse ornate furniture.
There's a crypt! There's a bookshop. There's a Colonnade. There's a picture room. The picture room becomes so much more interesting when the frumpy attendant pops a latch on the frame-cluttered screens and you watch the walls unfold into more walls. It is a very large book! As earlier mentioned with the Moreau box, I'm a sucker for these sort of ambitious ways of hiding and displaying an excessive amount of work.
There is no question that Soane loves his Renaissance tradition. Is there dust on any of the ornate busts or marble columns? In his mind, the Greeks or the Romans wouldn't have allowed it.
I've been enjoying thinking about the use of the delphic museum. Around Y2K THE Hans Ulrich Obrist curated a contemporary show in the space asking for artists' responses to the collection. However, the hearsay about this is that Obrist, who arguably has no competition when it comes to interviewing artists, conducted sessions with various artists on the top floor in one of Soane's parlors. Straight up: he just took artists up there and talked to them.
Hello.
Notwithstanding all of this, I suppose that my interest in these esoteric collections oft housed in, well, houses is that I think that Wagner would have enjoyed them. The intention of the Gesamtkunstwerk is at work. There is no question about it.