I’ll admit, I sort of just registered museumssuck.com because I wanted it to exist as a cosmic counterpoint to futureofmuseums.org. But now that we’re here, I’m game to live up to it.

Check it out, by the way, won’t you: futureofmuseums.org. The Center for the Future of Museums. “In order to thrive, grow and continue to provide vital services to society, museums need to be prepared to respond to massive changes that will take place in the 21st century.” Oh, good. We need more box lunch retreats about the struggle for museums’ relevance in a world gone Facebook. Hundred dollar discount if you become a member today!

Well, I don’t own a museum. I’m just another charlatan with box lunch retreats to peddle. So I don’t need to be on the de facto side of museums. If your city has three Starbucks then it also has a “hands-on science museum” and if it loses a war of relevance with Twitter: good riddance, I say.

Richard Dawkins tells an anecdote about how an erstwhile and highly succesful editor of New Scientist was once asked what the philosophy of New Scientist was under his direction and he replied, “Our philosophy at New Scientist is this: science is interesting, and if you don’t agree, you can fuck off.” And in that spirit, cheers to any museum not experiencing Drupal-induced existential angst. If you got the goods, right? There ain’t no Quickcam visitor feedback kiosk next to the Venus de Milo. (In fairness, louvre.fr does have a new My Personal Space™ section. I hope that sounds blingier en Français.)

To be clear, I’m agnostic on collections v. interactives and I’m very pro-technology. (I began and continue my career as an interactive exhibit engineer and developer.) My point is if your museum had the Venus de Milo, your museum wouldn’t suck. A priori. And you’d never have to stand up and tell the room your name, the museum you work for, and a little bit about your background before joining in a provocative group exchange session about how to stay relevant by leveraging Flickr.

But you don’t have the Venus de Milo. So… what do you have instead?

It’s a fair question. Nay, it’s the question. The Louvre has Venus. What do you have instead? If you can answer that question confidently and concisely without a lot of stimulating-the-following-target-audiences mission statement hooey–and your answer isn’t on SecondLife, then you may be one the few museums that doesn’t suck.

You’re a museum, right? You’re not an outreach summercamp. You’re not an Imax theatre lobby. You’re not a social networking iPhone app. Be a museum. And try harder not to suck at it.

You want a real lesson the museum industry can learn from successful web 2.0 initiatives? Be really good at what you’re interested in and other people who are also interested in that will get excited and involved. Be really good at what you’re interested in and other people who aren’t also interested in that… will do something else. Let them.

Um, desuckification. TM. That sounds industry meme-worthy. It’s all the rage here in San Francisco. Being good at what you do is the new leveraged synergy. Remembering why you exist in the first place. Getting rid of the bloat and atrophy that has evolved since then.

Let’s have an honest moment, just the two of us: your museum sucks. Right? I’ve been there. It was all well and good when there were donors who couldn’t be bothered to notice as long as there was enough flattery and free scotch at the white tie gala. Ah, it was fun while it lasted. But now you’re in trouble, aren’t you? Mandatory furloughs. Aggressive new pie chart goals for the membership team. Renegotiating percentages with the gift shop firm. Look at the agenda from your last crisis meeting. If that meeting wasn’t fundamentally about making your museum suck less, you needn’t have bothered.

At one point in the early-1990s, Blockbuster Video was opening one new retail location every seventeen hours. During that same period, three (3) hands-on science museums opened in the state of Ohio. Oh, and all those major label deals for grunge bands? Good luck. Museums suck.