[This article originally appeared in PSFK about friend of Lucid, Filip Noterdaeme]

Filip Noterdaeme inside Homeless Simulator. Photo by Federica Paoletti.

From 2005-2007 The Homeless Museum of Art, aka HOMU, was housed in Director Filip Noterdaeme’s Brooklyn Heights walk-up apartment. When the landlord found out about the museum, and the visitations became as intrusive as a homeless person camped out in the front door well, the museum, fittingly, found itself without a home.

HoMu was created by Noterdaeme—a trained artist and curator himself—to critique an art world where artists often pander to the rich and art museums become houses for larger and larger gift shops and corporate logos. As he told the New York Times, “I am not anti-museums. But I think they have been taken over by corporatization and commercialization.” Homelessness as a social condition is used as a foil to contrast the realities of struggling artists and less influential art-appreciators against the excesses and exclusivity of the art/museum culture.

The museum—which still exists, but is no longer open to the public—includes such exhibits as the Homeless Simulator and Egg on Schiele (an tongue-in-cheek ‘homage’ to Egon Schiele). HoMu has also launched activist campaigns like Penniless at the Modern, where he and several others paid the $20 admission to NYC’s MoMA with pennies. HOMU seems particularly relevant today as the excesses of the financial sector reveal themselves. The downturned economy might prompt a more frank look at the health and wealth of the general populatin and new perspectives about the accessibility of art. Noterdaeme told the Times, “[in relation to the economy] we may be at a turning point. The foundations are getting a bit shaky, and we are beginning to look at the disenfranchised with a different eye. Maybe we are also reaching a point where we stop taking art for granted and really open up to it.”

[ via NYT]