Museotypes

Since the late 1960s, John Knight has utilized existing forms of distribution and communication—including magazine subscriptions, museum mailing lists, travel posters, recipes, and floor plans—to reconsider the social structures and value systems that support the exchange of ideas and commodities. By interrupting expected graphic identities, Knight’s work questions how branding and design affect the understanding of objects, and at times institutions. Museotypes depicts 60 international museums, not by their logos or facades, but as floor plans on bone-china dinner plates. In this ironically commemorative series, the plates simultaneously venerate their subjects as collectable items and reduce them to commercially available, limited-edition souvenirs. Thus, the museum is literally put on display, and as the artist explained, the work as a whole becomes "a representation of the museum and its role in culture."