The Delirious Museum: A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas
Calum Storrie's book The Delirious Museum: A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas was published by I. B. Tauris in 2006 and is distributed by Palgrave Macmillan in the United States. It was chosen as a ‘Core’ book by academic distributors Lindsay & Croft for 2006.
The Delirious Museum is widely available in quality bookshops and on the Amazon website.
Calum Storrie’s site includes the full introduction and table of contents, as well as other related writings:
Table of Contents & Introduction
Museums should be invisible. I like art works and institutions that escape any physical presence. Things you can carry in your mind or in your pockets. It’s not a matter of laziness or frustration: maybe it’s a form of asceticism. With an imaginary museum you can do whatever you want, you can think about it before falling asleep, or you can go out in the morning and build it from scratch. And if it doesn’t work, there is nothing to be ashamed of. You can always say that it was simply an exercise in loss. In the end, I just think there is a certain strength in being invisible.
– Maurizio Cattelan
The Delirious Museum, Introduction
The Infraordinary Museum
[This section of The Delirious Museum was omitted prior to publication]
If the Delirious Museum can exist at all it needs some exhibits. But there is no purchasing fund and no accommodation. So, in order to start a collection, here are some stolen artefacts: fragments of film, books and lost rooms that continue the line begun by Baudelaire and carried through by the drunken Peasant and Guy Debord. They can be displayed whenever and wherever a suitable space is unearthed.
Missing Footnote
[Missing footnote from The Delirious Museum, Chapter 6 (From Soane to Soane'), describing an itinerary that leads from St Pancras Old Churchyard to Lincoln's Inn Fields.]
At the corner of Euston Road, instead of turning down Gower Street, descend the steps embedded within the Wellcome Trust building into Euston Square Underground Station. Imagine a rectilinear arch inverted, buried and excavated. The space left over after this process is the shape of the station (a shape in common with most underpasses). In order to avoid confusion ‘Transport for London’ has made a small ‘Ticket Hall’ label for the space which is displayed on the wall for your information. This ‘Ticket Hall’ is an elaborate and accidental homage to the form of Philip Hardwick’s Euston Arch that, until 1962, stood in Euston Square, now the area in front of the mainline station on Euston Road . . .
Soundtrack
A notional soundtrack for the Delirious Museum.
The list is based on association, convergence, coincidence and chance.