crypto-museology |ˈkriptō-myoōzēˈäləjē|


Crypto-museology” is the science, practice, or study of unverifiable and unsubstantiated cultural and museological practices. While “museology” refers to the science, practice, or study of museums, the prefix “crypto” comes from the Greek word “kruptos,” which translates to “hidden.” There are countless real and imagined fields and ideologies using the prefix—from crypto-Judaism to crypto-sporidium—yet crypto-museology is most closely related to crypto-zoology. After all, the crypto-zoologist searches for and studies marginal animals—such as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Unicorns, and Jackalopes—whose existence or survival remains unsubstantiated or disputed. By engaging with entities and bodies of knowledge that deny normative ordering mechanisms, both crypto-epistemological methodologies refute the guarantee of an objective and decipherable world.

A museological display is generally considered to be complete1, with each observable in perfect communication with another to generate a perceived whole—a narrative gestalt. The crypto-museologist looks not to the manifest items intended for display, but regards the display as a series of traces of missing, hidden, remote, latent, or implied procedures. Crypto-museology exists in the shadows cast by the museological drive towards illumination. If museology is engaged in the organization of matter, crypto-museology is engaged in the organization of antimatter, like a black hole, only observable through its pull on the known.

Both fields are speculative, grounded in the abstraction of terms to fit into a system. However, while museology aspires to consensus and concreteness, crypto-museology is fluid, adaptable, and exponential; it is about expanding potential not acquiring proof. Baudrillard is widely considered to have inadvertently written the most appropriate manifesto for aspiring crypto-museologists:

Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion—in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real.”2

After all, the word “cipher” has its origins in the numeral 0, which was once so abstract a concept that it drifted to become synonymous with willful obfuscation. The crypto-museologist’s attraction to encryption is a response to the pervasiveness of information today, and is motivated by critical skepticism towards the notion of any fixed decodable meaning. Thus crypto-museology resists definition; with swashes of urine, crypto-museology crystallizes those letters that might form words and sentences to communicate its secrets.

One can no longer rest assured that the artist whose work is on display was ever born or will ever be deceased, that pseudonyms are not simply anagrams or the hijacked names of other artists, that the artist giving a lecture is the true artist, that the press release announces anything but imagination, that a table of contents refers to genuine contents, that the trailer advertises an actual film, that the catalog corresponds to an actual exhibition, that invisible works cannot be insured, or that shipping companies were not secretly hired to deliver work missing. Today, disappearance is simply another form of appearance; the immaterial corporalities that remain form dimensions to be mined.

- Chris Fitzpatrick & Post Brothers


crypto-museological |-zēəˈläjikəl| adjective

crypto-museologist |-jist| noun

1. Although, as Susan Stewart has noted in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, a collection can never be complete and that a collection’s content is defined by what it lacks.

2. Baudrillard, Jean. The Perfect Crime (New York: Verso, 1996) p.105