The Menial Collection

The Menial Collection is a newly established, peer-reviewed journal of art theory and post-modernity, in the form of a pastiche of an arts organization based in Houston, Texas, The Menil Collection. This journal is dedicated to the publication of essays, papers, and interviews, which call into question what is entailed within high-browed intellectualism, and hierarchies propagated by, as well as within, museums. Our interest in pastiche lays in the conception of the capitalist powers of the institution. Specifically how the Menil Collection engages with the creation and dissemination of knowledge through their anti-didactic policies. While the Menil encourages a one-on-one experience with the object, an attempt to disengage with enforced conceptualism, they inadvertently create a systemic hierarchy where viewers are expected to engage on a theoretical level without any educational element, disenfranchising those without any art historical background. Our goal is to underscore this paradox by combining works of critical theory, low art, and high art to not only destabilize the hierarchies, within their set framework, but also call into question the idea of artistic hierarchies at large.