The Museum of Everyone

Inspired, perhaps, by my recent visit to The Museum of Everything with Peter Blake’s huge collection of bric-a-brac and outsider art, I was thinking wouldn’t it be great if everyone, after they died, had a museum of their stuff to remember them by? After all, we are what we buy. Gravestones are pretty boring objects, telling you almost nothing about a person’s life, and paying a weekly or monthly trip to the cemetery is a grim affair, so why not convert graveyards into multi-story buildings where each room is a personal museum of the dead. Favourite books, records, paintings, photos, furniture, clothes and bric-a-brac could all feature; indeed anything at all that made the person what they were.

It seems sad when a person dies all their stuff has to be cleared out; relatives and friends might keep a few choice items, some of it might be sold, the rest given to charity shops or binned. It would be great to keep their memory alive with a room of their favourite things; or even a recreation of their favourite room.

It goes without saying that my ‘tomb room’ would be fascinating but I’m worried about other people’s rooms being rather bland, perhaps consisting of IKEA furniture, wide screen TVs, bad DVDs and Wiis. No matter. We can have computer monitors in the rooms too, to display photos, videos, witty emails, cool Facebook friends and any other online stuff to make them look interesting.