7.24.2025

I was going to write about visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art with BK and his son but it's closed due to excessive heat. The friendly barista at the coffee shop I've been camping out in all week acts as my docent for all things local. It gets really hot in the museum, she says. They don't really have good ventilation or anything. Another under-funded institution, I guess. Who knows what the problem is. I'd like to think it's a conceptual art piece, that the museum is intentionally uncomfortable. I've seen more sadistic art in my time. The idea is to track how long each visitor lasts and cross-reference that with the heat index. After ten years of this there will be a readout displayed on a big wall in the foyer, thematically linked to the climate change phenomenon but also a statement on manipulation, among other things. The word quantification will appear several times on the document. The project will suffer a setback when a museum-goer suffers heat stroke in one of the innermost galleries, where several dead birds are mounted on the walls in an exhibit called "Investigating Decomposition", but the commitment to the long game by the museum's directors and the shadowy artist behind the project will stay steady as they spiral into a funnel of deflections and lies, and a journalist in some civilization in the future will ask the question Was it Worth it? and no one will know the story or the museum and the City of Detroit will be a mythical green place made of stories like this one.