The images in my Imaginary Museum are a history of art and taste (my own: you won’t find Jean Renoir, for example). It’s also a response to my inability to see everything in person that I want to see: it is unlikely that I’ll be ever be able to visit The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg or The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, for instance; nor, alas, am I getting any younger, which may exclude Angkhor Wat, Macchu Picchu, and Easter Island.
Walter Benjamin wrote this about another passion:
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. At this point many of you will remember with pleasure the large library which Jean Paul’s poor schoolmaster Wutz gradually acquired by writing, himself, all the works whose titles interested him in book-fair catalogues; after all, he could not afford to buy them.
— Walter Benjamin, From ‘Unpacking my Library,’ 1931
That a person can build an Imaginary Museum was discovered by André Malraux in 1947, because of the new availability of high-quality color photographs of visual art from everywhere in the world.
The Internet is an Imaginary Museum on an unimaginable scale. I hope you enjoy mine.