‘Founding’ a museum is not something anyone can successfully do. It takes a lot of effort, time, plans, and strategies to find the right location, the finest art collections, and financing. And although it seems to be a Sisyphean task, MO Museum—a Lithuanian museum that showcases art created from the 1950s to the present day—somehow managed to rise from ashes to aesthetically please the public with its best art treasures.
Now that the museum has a solid foundation, a library, a shop, a cinema, a theatre, a conference hall, and a bistro, it still misses something. Financing! That’s why these institutions usually can’t afford to be elitist or selective. They can’t be too highbrow, uninviting or cold. Rather, they have to be a place where anyone, despite being erudite in art or not, feels good and cozy.
To communicate its key principles, the gallery reached for New! agency‘s help—a Lithuanian creative company that is known for solving any kind of problems—and created an unusual visual experience to show what the institution is all about. The Vilnius-based agency can mark this task as successfully complete because their creatives crafted a two-minute-long video in which they explain the story of the world using only art pieces exhibited on the museum’s walls. Pretty clever, wouldn’t you say?
More than 60 masterpieces from the gallery’s collection were used by the problem-solving team to narrate the simple tale of the Earth. And that is an extraordinary effort because many Lithuanians are not that excited about art or historical events (well, they are probably not alone). But once the art pieces were placed side by side and narratively linked, things started to positively change.
“In this way, we were able to show that each potential visitor can surely find something to relate to in Lithuanian modern art, and that local art has the power to speak about universal topics,” said the creative team behind the project.
The museum has art pieces that cater to the taste of each visitor. The audience can now relate to the masterpieces of the Lithuanian modern art, whilst the local gallery has now the power to show to the world how exquisite its visual secrets are.
“The video was premiered online and at a museum’s launch press conference. And whenever skeptical journalists burst into an applause, we knew, it was not only us who were happy with the result,” added the agency. The results of the film exceeded everyone’s expectations, with the creative team claiming that it gathered thousands of views, hundreds of shares, whilst the mass media covered the initiative with lots of articles.
The short movie has made us very curious about what lies behind the museum’s walls. You should also listen to the world’s story below and then let us know if it has stimulated your creativity as much as it did ours.