It’s not that big of a building. If we started a collection I bet we could buy ourselves a warehouse and make the NEW world’s largest museum dedicated to a single artist (probably Grant Wood, but I’m open to suggestions).
Dr. Boli has a suggestion. It is true that Marcel Duchamp is dead, but he shows us the way, and therefore the new world’s largest museum dedicated to a single artist should be dedicated to a living artist, but one who steals Duchamp’s shtick.
Duchamp’s “readymades” were objects found in the ordinary world, but given a title by Duchamp and exhibited as art. Obviously anybody literate enough to write a title, or articulate enough to dictate one to a secretary, can create this sort of art, though it would be helpful if our artist could have the kind of subtle and delicately ironical sense of humor Duchamp displayed when he exhibited a urinal with the title Fountain. (From Wikipedia: “Fountain was selected in 2004 as ‘the most influential artwork of the 20th century’ by 500 renowned artists and historians.” This explains the twentieth century.)
To do this again would obviously be stealing Duchamp’s shtick, but artists have been stealing each other’s shticks since the days of Phidias. There is an artistic incantation that makes everything all right: you simply say, “I am an artist of the school of Duchamp.”
Now, see how easy this makes our project of building the world’s largest single-artist museum. All we have to do is buy some big warehouse at a sheriff’s sale with all the contents in place. Then we send our pet artist in to spend a week labeling everything with whatever titles strike the artist’s fancy. When the last plaque is in place, we open our museum to the public at $25 a head, and we have a unique tourist attraction that bumps the Andy Warhol Museum down to second—and with much less effort than it would take to gather a bunch of stuffy old paintings by Grant Wood.