Customers inevitably ask about the museum’s namesake and Shawn Mediaclast, the owner and sole employee, refers them to a stack of handouts at the countertop’s edge.
It all began in 1917.
Arthur Feinstein detested the snobbery of high art so much that upon moving from Europe to Rerun, Wash., he opened the Museum of Unfine Art in a barn. Then 19 years old, Feinstein hosted vaudevillian events that incorporated acrobats, clowns and animals. In one of his most popular acts, overhydrated midget cows consumed food coloring and urinated onto what became “improvisational watercolor paintings.” From the small barn, Feinstein relocated his museum to an abandoned granary where he sold cigarettes and pipe tobacco to offset costs.
Feinstein retired in 1970 and died in 2002, but his unconventional concept has withstood time. In 2002, Mediaclast, a local collage artist, Club Snafu DJ and musician, opened the Museum of Unfine Art and Record Store on Willamette Street, north of the Hult Center and across from the downtown post office.
Without the watercolor peeing cows, the museum pays homage to Feinstein’s tradition and plays off of the French musique concreté movement of the 1940s and ’50s. Like the concreté music that is cut and spliced together, the museum art, for the most part, “comes from things that already existed.” From a media-saturated world comes media-saturated art, fashion and music, Mediaclast explained.
Thousands of new and used CDs, records, DVDs and VHS cassettes fill the aisles of baby blue crates in the museum. Art, in some form or another – paintings, collages, mannequin heads clad with wigs, dangling wire fly sculptures – penetrates every inch of the eclectic space.
“What’s happening, man!” Mediaclast says often while greeting his regular customers. “Dude, what can I do for you?” He is on a first-name basis with them. In a museum and record store such as this, his “niche clientele is arbitrarily maintained.” Customers frequent the museum to suggest ideas for the art gallery that rotates about every two weeks; to seek out new music, DVDs and clothing; or to grab a pack of cigarettes and a soft drink.
Mediaclast, a kind and quietly intellectual 38-year-old who wears gray, wide-rimmed glasses and a knit beanie, offers “independent, creative and experimental music.” Beyond the standard hip-hop and rock genres, customers peruse less familiar titles such as jungle, no-wave, and avant-garde.
“There are thousands of genres (of music) but only five orthodoxies,” Mediaclast said. This, he lamented, makes many types of music stale, especially those under “the industry’s command.” Among the CDs found in the crates are The Beatles, Cat Power, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Amy Winehouse and James Brown.
Beyond buying, trading and collecting vast quantities of music, Mediaclast sells turntables, synthesizers and jaw harps. Funky postcards, prints and Special Effects hair color highlight the mix of museum merchandise, as well as an aisle of vintage clothing, shoes, accessories and local designers’ T-shirts. In the front left window, Mediaclast displays four shiny ZAP scooters, which he sells for $2,950 each. Encouraging the use of electric scooters, he hopes, will help to support sustainable modes of transportation in Eugene and spur rebellion against the oil companies.
Since opening seven years ago, Mediaclast has featured the work of more than 700 artists, rotating exhibits every two weeks or so. This includes the latest show, “Women in sports and other such esoteric images as metaphor,” a painting series by Jeremy Covert. Also on display are Mediaclast’s collages, which often take him two to six months to complete once he has categorized collage materials.
According to its flyer, the Willamette Street museum and record store “contains many of the same unwholesome ingredients that brought one nineteenth century logging town into the twentieth century laughing (and coughing) hysterically.”
Behind the traditional fine arts scene that spans downtown, the museum is a quaint, tucked-away community gem.
Fine Arts Reporter
[email protected]
Uncommon and utterly unique
Daily Emerald
January 7, 2009
0
More to Discover