What do you think?
Rate this book
The Imaginary Museum
Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary, imaginary museum. Stand in front of some of the most incomprehensible art works in the world with an expert guide by your side, full of personal stories, expertise and human understanding.
In a stunningly original memoir and art guide we find ourselves among outrageous artworks, and we return again and again to the same question:
“But what does it mean?”
With the help of a cast of critics, guards, curators, artists, protestors and ghosts, Eastham explores the idea that the value of art is not to be found in what it means, but in what it does to you.
This is an argument to forget about what is and is not art and to instead think courageously and creatively about how things really make you feel. You don’t have to like the art works in this or any gallery, you don’t have to fully understand them either, but we can benefit from existing alongside them. And in doing so we learn about ourselves, and each other.
In a stunningly original memoir and art guide we find ourselves among outrageous artworks, and we return again and again to the same question:
“But what does it mean?”
With the help of a cast of critics, guards, curators, artists, protestors and ghosts, Eastham explores the idea that the value of art is not to be found in what it means, but in what it does to you.
This is an argument to forget about what is and is not art and to instead think courageously and creatively about how things really make you feel. You don’t have to like the art works in this or any gallery, you don’t have to fully understand them either, but we can benefit from existing alongside them. And in doing so we learn about ourselves, and each other.
- GenresArtNonfiction
64 pages, Hardcover
Published August 6, 2020
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
May 8, 2026
🖼️ ART WITHOUT THE PEDESTAL 🖼️
Ben Eastham burns the map and invites you to get lost in an art gallery of the mind, where the only rule is that your opinion is just as valid as the curator’s.
“The museum is not a place of worship; it is a place of argument.”
🎨 The Vibe Check:
If you loved John Berger’s Ways of Seeing but wished it was written by a witty, slightly cynical friend over several glasses of wine, The Imaginary Museum is your next obsession. It’s an antidote to "International Art English" and the stuffiness of white-cube galleries.
📖 The Rundown:
Eastham takes us on a "personal tour" through a conceptual museum. There are no maps, no velvet ropes, and certainly no bored security guards. Instead, he tackles the most polarizing elements of contemporary art—ghosts (the presence of the past), nudity (the vulnerability of the body), and disagreements (the friction that makes art vital).
He weaves together personal memoir, art theory, and encounters with specific works (from Marina Abramović to Marcel Duchamp) to argue that art doesn't happen on the canvas or the plinth; it happens in the space between the object and the viewer’s eye.
✨ Why This Book is a Revelation:
The De-Mystification: Eastham has a gift for explaining high-concept "difficult" art without ever sounding condescending. He makes you feel smart enough to "get it."
The Humor: The book is genuinely funny. His descriptions of the absurdities of the art world provide much-needed levity to heavy philosophical questions.
The Structure: By building an "imaginary" museum, the author frees the reader from the physical exhaustion of a real gallery, allowing the ideas to breathe.
⚠️ A Note for Readers:
Not a Reference Book: This is not a "who’s who" of contemporary art. It is a deeply personal, idiosyncratic essay. If you want a dry encyclopedia, look elsewhere.
Intellectual Friction: Eastham wants you to disagree with him. If you aren't prepared to have your assumptions about "what counts as art" challenged, this might be a frustrating read.
⭐️ THE VERDICT:
Final Rating: ⭐⭐⭐✨ ✨
Ben Eastham burns the map and invites you to get lost in an art gallery of the mind, where the only rule is that your opinion is just as valid as the curator’s.
“The museum is not a place of worship; it is a place of argument.”
🎨 The Vibe Check:
If you loved John Berger’s Ways of Seeing but wished it was written by a witty, slightly cynical friend over several glasses of wine, The Imaginary Museum is your next obsession. It’s an antidote to "International Art English" and the stuffiness of white-cube galleries.
📖 The Rundown:
Eastham takes us on a "personal tour" through a conceptual museum. There are no maps, no velvet ropes, and certainly no bored security guards. Instead, he tackles the most polarizing elements of contemporary art—ghosts (the presence of the past), nudity (the vulnerability of the body), and disagreements (the friction that makes art vital).
He weaves together personal memoir, art theory, and encounters with specific works (from Marina Abramović to Marcel Duchamp) to argue that art doesn't happen on the canvas or the plinth; it happens in the space between the object and the viewer’s eye.
✨ Why This Book is a Revelation:
The De-Mystification: Eastham has a gift for explaining high-concept "difficult" art without ever sounding condescending. He makes you feel smart enough to "get it."
The Humor: The book is genuinely funny. His descriptions of the absurdities of the art world provide much-needed levity to heavy philosophical questions.
The Structure: By building an "imaginary" museum, the author frees the reader from the physical exhaustion of a real gallery, allowing the ideas to breathe.
⚠️ A Note for Readers:
Not a Reference Book: This is not a "who’s who" of contemporary art. It is a deeply personal, idiosyncratic essay. If you want a dry encyclopedia, look elsewhere.
Intellectual Friction: Eastham wants you to disagree with him. If you aren't prepared to have your assumptions about "what counts as art" challenged, this might be a frustrating read.
⭐️ THE VERDICT:
The Imaginary Museum is a vital, refreshing, and beautifully written defense of contemporary art. It’s for anyone who has ever stood in front of a pile of bricks in a gallery and felt like they were missing the joke. Eastham shows us that the joke—and the beauty—is ours to define.
Final Rating: ⭐⭐⭐✨ ✨
September 10, 2024
"Art is not special: it happens all the time and every day."
Eastham's essay about contemporary art brought me joy as he grabbed my hand and took me on a journey of his imaginary art museum with characters and unique art at every turn. He also pushed me to reflect on my own judgments and perspectives on the genre (which i admit to having). What a wonderfully unique perspective on the roles of not only the viewer but also the critic. Man, I wish I could just make art. Give it a go if you want to giggle a lil and learn more about art:)
Eastham's essay about contemporary art brought me joy as he grabbed my hand and took me on a journey of his imaginary art museum with characters and unique art at every turn. He also pushed me to reflect on my own judgments and perspectives on the genre (which i admit to having). What a wonderfully unique perspective on the roles of not only the viewer but also the critic. Man, I wish I could just make art. Give it a go if you want to giggle a lil and learn more about art:)
January 19, 2021
Published in 2020, this is Eastham’s creative essay on the appreciation of contemporary art. It is structured as a tour around Eastham’s imaginary museum, and weaves together elements of his own history with art, discussion of specific pieces, and the big contemporary debates about what ‘counts’ as art and who funds it.
This was a highly readable and enjoyable essay which covered many of the main talking points in contemporary art in a manner which was friendly to me a something of a novice. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Some highlights:
It’s easier to conclude that ‘the only definition of art’, as the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth put it, ‘is art’. Which is another way of saying that art is not a theory, it’s an activity. And, by extension, that art today is less about the formal or aesthetic properties of an object than a way of talking about the intricately entangled, increasingly unstable world in which we live.
—
Self-interrogation, which is a step in the direction of self-knowledge, seems to me pretty much the whole point of looking at art. Why does this jumble of shapes and colours make me feel happy or alienated or seen? What does the response reveal of my own (unexamined) prejudices, my own state of mind? If you are charmed by a video work which collages together clips of cats playing on the piano, or irritated by a stack of broken televisions, or thrilled by a nineteenth-century painting of an idyllic landscape, what does that tell you about yourself in relation to the society that sees fit to put those works in museums?
—
I started this essay with the brief conversation with a critic because it offers a way of looking at art. Put bluntly, you sometimes need to acknowledge that you have no fucking idea what you’re looking at. Instead of worrying about not getting it, attend to your feelings and then afterwards try and figure out what catalysed that reaction.
The great American painter Ed Ruscha summarized this very Proustian idea in a more Californian idiom: a good work of art, he said, provokes the reaction ‘Huh? Wow!’ and a bad one the anticlimactic ‘Wow! Huh?’ In other words, if you can’t make head or tail of a work of art but nonetheless feel something towards it – attraction or repulsion, delight or rage, wonder or confusion – you’re halfway to having a meaningful experience of it. (And a lot closer than anyone who claims to have it all worked out beforehand.)
—
There’s no shame, sometimes, in judging art by the simplest metric: would I want it in my house?
—
I don’t recognize art as a dead category capable of definition at all, but as the human urge to express our position in relation to a universe electrified by consciousness.
This was a highly readable and enjoyable essay which covered many of the main talking points in contemporary art in a manner which was friendly to me a something of a novice. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Some highlights:
It’s easier to conclude that ‘the only definition of art’, as the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth put it, ‘is art’. Which is another way of saying that art is not a theory, it’s an activity. And, by extension, that art today is less about the formal or aesthetic properties of an object than a way of talking about the intricately entangled, increasingly unstable world in which we live.
—
Self-interrogation, which is a step in the direction of self-knowledge, seems to me pretty much the whole point of looking at art. Why does this jumble of shapes and colours make me feel happy or alienated or seen? What does the response reveal of my own (unexamined) prejudices, my own state of mind? If you are charmed by a video work which collages together clips of cats playing on the piano, or irritated by a stack of broken televisions, or thrilled by a nineteenth-century painting of an idyllic landscape, what does that tell you about yourself in relation to the society that sees fit to put those works in museums?
—
I started this essay with the brief conversation with a critic because it offers a way of looking at art. Put bluntly, you sometimes need to acknowledge that you have no fucking idea what you’re looking at. Instead of worrying about not getting it, attend to your feelings and then afterwards try and figure out what catalysed that reaction.
The great American painter Ed Ruscha summarized this very Proustian idea in a more Californian idiom: a good work of art, he said, provokes the reaction ‘Huh? Wow!’ and a bad one the anticlimactic ‘Wow! Huh?’ In other words, if you can’t make head or tail of a work of art but nonetheless feel something towards it – attraction or repulsion, delight or rage, wonder or confusion – you’re halfway to having a meaningful experience of it. (And a lot closer than anyone who claims to have it all worked out beforehand.)
—
There’s no shame, sometimes, in judging art by the simplest metric: would I want it in my house?
—
I don’t recognize art as a dead category capable of definition at all, but as the human urge to express our position in relation to a universe electrified by consciousness.
March 3, 2024
my imaginary museum has some weird ass rooms trust me
March 23, 2026
This book was very interesting, it didn't challenge me in the way I thought it would but still good.
Nice for a shorter read in-between my other reading.
Nice for a shorter read in-between my other reading.
December 12, 2021
I cannot stress enough how much I loved this essay. Eastham really gets it! I have been waiting for years for someone to actually describe the experience of going to a gallery and interacting with art in a way that reflects my own experience and Eastham does it so well here. I want to give this essay to everyone who thinks they don't get art or think they can't judge an artwork on their own.
My friend and I have this phrase for when a song resonates with you which is 'When it hits, it hits', which sounds super dumb but expresses the experience so well and I think Eastham achieves describing such an experience in much more elegant language. Sometimes you might look at an artwork and be overwhelmed about how beautiful it is and a few years later you might come back to it and it might not hit the same and that's such an interesting experience and I have never heard anyone talk about it before.
But Eastham does so much here by pointing out how the art can inspire self-exploration but also reveal the society we live in. Eastham points out several thing to consider when you look at an artwork like asking yourself what has been left out of the frame and what it means to live in a society that has chosen to exhibit this artwork in a museum.
The style of the essay is super fun as well as Eastham creates an imaginary museum full of artwork that he has seen previously that are used to help him make a point about art in general. During Eastham's tour of the imaginary museum we encounter a few people that disagree with him about what he's saying which kind of reminded me of a Socratic dialogue, which is cool!
Anyway, I can't recommend this essay enough and will surely be coming back to it several times. This book is kind of what I wanted out of Grayson Perry's 'Playing to the Gallery', which is a shame as I doubt that it will be as popular as the Perry book has been.
My friend and I have this phrase for when a song resonates with you which is 'When it hits, it hits', which sounds super dumb but expresses the experience so well and I think Eastham achieves describing such an experience in much more elegant language. Sometimes you might look at an artwork and be overwhelmed about how beautiful it is and a few years later you might come back to it and it might not hit the same and that's such an interesting experience and I have never heard anyone talk about it before.
But Eastham does so much here by pointing out how the art can inspire self-exploration but also reveal the society we live in. Eastham points out several thing to consider when you look at an artwork like asking yourself what has been left out of the frame and what it means to live in a society that has chosen to exhibit this artwork in a museum.
The style of the essay is super fun as well as Eastham creates an imaginary museum full of artwork that he has seen previously that are used to help him make a point about art in general. During Eastham's tour of the imaginary museum we encounter a few people that disagree with him about what he's saying which kind of reminded me of a Socratic dialogue, which is cool!
Anyway, I can't recommend this essay enough and will surely be coming back to it several times. This book is kind of what I wanted out of Grayson Perry's 'Playing to the Gallery', which is a shame as I doubt that it will be as popular as the Perry book has been.
June 21, 2021
Do you identify as a person who “gets” art, a person who is ashamed not to get art, or a person that believes that “bewilderment has a proud intellectual history”? Are you more likely to fake it until you make it or contend that “you shouldn’t force it, and you can’t pretend”? While you sort through these quandaries, check out The Imaginary Museum by Ben Eastham, accompany him on a tour through the whimsical museum of his mind, and assess the timelessness of art as a measure of the extent to which it “rewards different interpretations as the world changes around it.”
February 22, 2022
Not a long read, but very worthwhile. Eastham's humourous approach to the critique of art amidst a fictional environment raises the important questions and provides some answers to the way we perceive contemporary art today. Particularly salient for both those outside the world of 'art beyond aesthetic sensation' and those operating within it - "sometimes you need to acknowledge that you have no f**king idea what you're looking at" (p. 9). It's perhaps this acknowledgement that will open up the deepest opportunities for viewing the world from new perspectives through contemporary art.
March 1, 2026
This is a great essay for anyone who wants the answer to "what is contemporary art and why can't I get it?" It is a short, easy read, and the writing is well complemented with humor, yet it also provides a detailed explanation of how to look at and understand the art world and contemporary art. As someone from the field, it gave me a better understanding and appreciation of some concepts in the art world that I had taken for granted.
Whether you are from the art field or not, if you're interested in art and sometimes want to stand in a museum and understand what is happening around you and how to explain your emotions while looking at art, this essay is for you.
Whether you are from the art field or not, if you're interested in art and sometimes want to stand in a museum and understand what is happening around you and how to explain your emotions while looking at art, this essay is for you.
April 21, 2024
As a current art student, this was one of those books that gave me the “you’re not alone” whiplash. If comfort and understanding is something you seek from your reading then Eastham will provide it to you. This short read is not only insightful but delightfully mischievous at the same time. I recommend it to everyone.
January 17, 2022
A exquisitely playful look at what visiting art spaces can feel like sometimes. I loved how well it captured the inevitable impostor syndrome one has when being at a complete loss on the supposed meaning of an approached work of art. And I also really enjoyed the author's candid and humorous voice.
May 1, 2022
Maybe it was the joy of being on a sun lounger in rural France eating a mango ice lolly while reading this that made it so incredible or maybe it’s actually a wonderfully inventive, educational tour of the art world in an accessible and fascinating way? Read it yourself and find out.
August 23, 2020
It’s like a walk in amigo art museum(another name for this book). Very lively and diverse view on many art aspects
March 28, 2021
3.5 it'll definitely make you think and view some things differently
March 31, 2021
Incredibly insightful and thought provoking essay on the complexities of art and how it can speak for us or help us see the world around us.
August 6, 2022
Truly delightful and incredibly accessible. The essay summarises and discusses some really important topics and arguments whilst remaining engaging and sharp in its humour.
September 21, 2022
Charming, thought-provoking, and quick
March 24, 2024
How to describe this book… Laugh-out-loud funny, self-aware, abstract; yet poignant and concise. I loved it.
July 29, 2024
Hilarious and a very great commentary on contemporary art - love thinking about what would me in my museum of the mind
January 3, 2025
The concept behind the book is a good one but I really wanted more depth; it's a short book that tries to cover too much.
February 17, 2025
Uma boa introdução a arte contemporânea, Esatham tem uma narrativa divertida e usa bem do estilo que o livro se propõe de um guia por um museu imaginário, bem inventivo e consegue de forma concisa abordar seu assunto mesmo que de forma breve e levemente rasa. Recomendo ouvir em audiobook se quiser a vibe ainda maior de visitação a um museu.
May 5, 2023
I am so glad I came across this book.
It was such a fun and creative read.
Eastham manages to talk about a wide range of Art topics, themes, and ethical dilemmas.
All without being condescending
And with a ton of humor.
Instant favourite.
It was such a fun and creative read.
Eastham manages to talk about a wide range of Art topics, themes, and ethical dilemmas.
All without being condescending
And with a ton of humor.
Instant favourite.
July 14, 2023
New favourite book???? Maybe???
Charming, clever, lovely and full of love for the world
Update: even a month later, I have somehow retained the habit of asking “what would Ben Easton say?” as a way of reminding myself of nuance, humour, and the other side of the coin.
Charming, clever, lovely and full of love for the world
Update: even a month later, I have somehow retained the habit of asking “what would Ben Easton say?” as a way of reminding myself of nuance, humour, and the other side of the coin.
December 29, 2025
I learned an unexpected amount being led on a tour of an imaginary museum!
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews