MOQA
Museum of Questionable Art — a completely straight-faced institution preserving art that maybe should not be preserved.
It started with a discovery: my cousin can describe and celebrate any piece of art like a seasoned curator — no matter what you put in front of him. The worse the painting, the better the appraisal. The whole concept of 'questionable' art was born on one of our family trips to Switzerland, and those trips left such good memories that I wanted to keep them alive. So for his next birthday, I procured 'Coon au Yeux', by the lesser-known artist Topografitti.
To make the gift more fun, I decided the piece deserved a proper institution to live in. On the way from Amsterdam to Tallinn I used the hours to put MOQA together — the Museum of Questionable Art — its logo and landing page designed in Figma, leaning on a past life making websites for actual galleries. I tracked down the domain moqa.li to make the whole thing feel that much more exclusive, and the museum opened its doors with 'Coon au Yeux' as the inaugural acquisition.
The whole thing is played completely straight, and the straight face is the joke: full curatorial voice, a 'Collection' and an 'Institute', a permanent collection that leans heavily on Renaissance oil portraits of extremely dignified cats. The more seriously the institution takes itself, the better the joke lands. Mission statement: preserving uncertainty, methodically, indefinitely.