History

The Story of Museum Sage

The concept of Museum Sage® was created by writer and performer Jon Spayde in response to his wife, Laurie Phillips, feeling frustrated at an art museum because she couldn’t slow her mind down enough to connect with the art and the artist. She was quickly glancing at a painting, then the wall label, glancing, reading, glancing, reading.

Jon had been studying books by the French Surrealists and, in the twinkling of an eye, used them as inspiration to come up with a whole different way to see art and artifacts. A new paradigm was born.

Since the creation of Museum Sage, people all over the world have benefited from using this fun and soulful practice to get direction on some pretty gnarly life issues — and experience art in a whole new way.

Museum Sage has been played in person at art museums since 2000. As of 2020 it’s also available as an online experience.

Here are some of the institutions who have invited Museum Sage LLC to offer sessions in their museums:

  • de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA

  • Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

  • High Museum, Atlanta, GA

  • Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA

  • Portland Museum, Portland, ME

  • Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN

  • Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, ME

  • Museum of Russian Icons, Clinton, MA

  • St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO

  • Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, BC, Canada

The Art History Inspiration Behind Museum Sage

The initial inspiration for Museum Sage® was the outing that Andre Breton and Alberto Giacometti made to the Saint-Ouen flea market in 1934, recounted in Breton’s L’Amour Fou (Mad Love) of 1937. As they strolled in the market in a state of dreamy receptivity, Giacometti found himself drawn to an enigmatic metal mask that might have been used in fencing, and Breton to a long ladle with a tiny backpiece on which it rested, the backpiece having the shape of a shoe. 

A little while after bringing them home, the artists realized that the mask and ladle were “speaking” to them. The mask helped Giacometti find forms to complete the face of a figural sculpture he was working on, and the ladle, with its shoe-backpiece and its resemblance to a ballet slipper, catalyzed in Breton the childhood memory of hearing the story of Cinderella and her glass slipper. 

This ability of chance objects, seized upon without forethought, to answer questions and evoke personal memories suggested to Museum Sage co-founders, Laurie Phillips and Jon Spayde that encounters with artworks could be similarly productive if they could induce in inquirers a similar kind of reverie — turn them, that is, into temporary Surrealists.

The dreamlike state created by inviting the Museum Sage participant to tune into their other senses while moving through the museum’s space has its roots in Surrealist oneiricism. Participants “wandering” through a museum or through its collection online also pays homage to those offspring of Surrealist flanerie, the Situationist dérive and the contemporary exploration of mind and space called psychogeography.

Laurie and Jon realized that they wanted to initiate the entire process — the choosing of the section of the museum in which the on-site Museum Sage session would take place — in a random, chance way, by having the inquirer close their eyes and intuitively choose a gallery and artwork number. For online experiences, a guided visualization is used to create the same effect.

Thus Museum Sage upholds the Cagean principle, enunciated by the great Los Angeles performance artist Rachel Rosenthal (and suitable as a motto for all of Museum Sage) that “chance knows what it’s doing.”