MOOP Manifesto
The art world has a problem.
For hundreds of years, what is considered beautiful, valuable and worth collecting has been determined by an elite minority:
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Those with the money and status to do so.
We can see the result of this in most major international collections of art, and the histories that are told through them.​​
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85% of those collections are white.
87% are male.
But these figures clearly demonstrate whose experience we have been describing.​
Art has always been a way to represent culture.
It is a medium for storytelling when words alone fall short of describing the human experience.
MOOP is on a mission to change this.
We believe in a more equitable and representative canon.
One where audiences and artists help to create and curate future histories.
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We are building an ecosystem that:
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-Deploys innovative and engaging ways to experience art, online and in person on our mobile app.​
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- Prioritises open access to the 95% of collections in storage, through our living, digital archive.
- Provides visibility and voice to those who have historically been excluded, via a community generated. historical record.
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We believe in a more human art history.
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Help us build it.
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MOOP Musings
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​About 500 years ago, history presented a unique blend of economic, religious and maritime dominance to a select few European nations.
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These nations used those advantages to export their systems of belief, commerce and cultural value to all corners of the globe, in the name of furthering trade, 'discovery' and a very specific type of civilisation.
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Collecting things as a reflection of self, of value, of power, of interest, of connection
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The act of collecting culture, of taking the finest examples of art and human creativity as symbols of a power
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Matter Out of Place is a term coined by British sociologist Mary Douglas.
She defined it as “anything that confuses the symbolic order of a culture”, those things in society that slip between the gaps in our systems of classification.
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MOOP is a platform for those who confuse the culture and expose the gaps by their very presence.
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New technologies (AI, ML, )bring unprecedented scale to the spread of information online. But we are already seeing that reproducing old data only serves to magnify existing divisions and amplify bias.
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Our national and private collections have built significant financial and cultural capital on the story of empire, of western primacy and their proximity to it.
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We need new data.
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We need new stories.
MOOP cultural essentialism.
power of narrative to shape our reality.
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3 billion people (mostly from non western nations)still not online. 1 Billion pending across africa, asia, middle east. They have very different stories to tell. There are new histories and
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We all MOOP
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Retelling the story of western primacy via a greco roman tradition, associated cultural values, assumed moral superiority and exaggerated sense of self worth is what gave much of our cultural collections value or worth for hundreds of years.
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As a middle class white boy from South London,
whose grandparents hail from 3 centres of empire (Ireland, Hong Kong and London Docklands) this spoke to me.
(people and cultures who often neither wanted nor needed their intervention.
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I created MOOP because I was bored of the art world. They thought too small. Too much navel gazing. Not enough action. Protecting profit over creating & facilitating culture.