Most museums collect things they can defend in a funding application. The ten below collect ventriloquist dummies, Victorian hair wreaths and frozen lasagna, and nobody involved appears to have worried much about defending anything.
The Museum of Bad Art, Boston
In 1994 a Boston antiques dealer spotted a painting poking out of a kerbside pile. He wanted the frame. His friend Jerry Reilly wanted the painting, and that disagreement turned into a museum. MOBA now holds roughly 600 works and hangs them in the basements of theatres in Dedham, Somerville and Brookline. Curators turn away most of what people offer, usually because it isn't bad enough. Paint-by-numbers and children's art don't qualify, and neither does anything on velvet: the artist has to have been trying, and gone wrong in a way worth looking at.
Sources: BBC Travel, NPR
Sulabh International Museum of Toilets, New Delhi
New Delhi's toilet museum opened in 1992, the work of Dr Bindeshwar Pathak, who spent decades campaigning on sanitation in India. The collection runs from 3000 BC to the end of the 20th century and draws on around 50 countries. There is a medieval English commode built to look like a treasure chest, a toilet hidden inside a bookcase, and a copy of the seat Louis XIV is said to have used while holding court. Sir John Harington's 1596 flush design gets a panel of its own. Time put the museum on a list of museums that are, in the magazine's words, anything but mundane.
Sources: Sulabh International Museum of Toilets, Wikipedia
Vent Haven Museum, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky
Open since 1973, and still the only museum in the world given over to ventriloquism. William Shakespeare Berger, a Cincinnati businessman, started with 500 dummies; the count now stands at 1,242, from the Civil War era through to figures worked by Jeff Dunham and Darci Lynne. Plenty of visitors arrive for the creeps and leave having read about vaudeville. The museum keeps its older, openly racist figures on display with explanatory text rather than in storage. Tours run May to September, by appointment.
Sources: Vent Haven Museum, Stars and Stripes
Leila's Hair Museum, Independence, Missouri
Human hair is the only medium on show here. Leila Cohoon taught cosmetology, began collecting in 1956 and opened the museum in 1986 inside the school she had founded. Inside were more than 700 wreaths and over 2,000 pieces of jewellery, mostly Victorian. The oldest item was a brooch dated 1680. One wall held hair from Elvis Presley, Abraham Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson, the last of which earned the place a Jeopardy! clue in 2016. Cohoon died in 2024, the museum closed in September 2025, and her granddaughter has been finding new homes for the collection since.
Museum of Failure, Helsingborg
A clinical psychologist, Samuel West, opened it in June 2017 with about 70 objects; it has since passed 150. Colgate's frozen beef lasagna, Harley-Davidson perfume, Bic pens marketed to women, Google Glass and the 1993 Apple Newton all sit behind glass. West's argument is that 80 to 90 percent of innovation projects fail and almost none get written down, so companies repeat the same mistakes.
Museum of Broken Relationships, Zagreb
This one started as a private problem. Two Zagreb artists, Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić, didn't know what to do with the objects left over from their own four-year relationship, so they exhibited them. A permanent museum opened in the Kulmer Palace in 2010 and won the European Museum Forum's Kenneth Hudson Award in 2011. The most photographed object is an axe that a Berlin woman used to break up her former partner's furniture; she donated it afterwards and described it as a therapy instrument. Thousands more have arrived, with about 100 on rotation in Zagreb, and a second permanent site opened in Chiang Mai in late 2024.
Sources: Museum of Broken Relationships, Wikipedia
Mmuseumm, TriBeCa, New York
A disused freight elevator shaft on Cortlandt Alley became a gallery in 2016, when Alex Kalman fitted it out with shelves. Six shelves, three walls, 36 square feet, room for about three people at a time. Exhibits have included counterfeit handbags seized at customs, objects confiscated at airport security, toothpaste tubes from different countries and a North Korean coin. Kalman calls the method object journalism.
Sources: The New York Times, Mmuseumm
National Mustard Museum, Middleton, Wisconsin
The collection began on a bad night in 1986, when Barry Levenson couldn't sleep after the Red Sox lost the World Series and ended up standing in front of the mustard in an all-night supermarket. The museum opened in 1992 and the permanent collection now runs past 7,100 jars from all 50 states and dozens of countries. Entry and tasting are free, and the shop sells several hundred varieties.
Sources: National Mustard Museum, WKOW
Haewoojae, Suwon
Between 1995 and 2002 the mayor of Suwon campaigned for better public toilets. Sim Jae-deok then had his own 30-year-old house rebuilt in the shape of a toilet in 2007, and the Korea Record Institute recognised it as the largest toilet sculpture in the country. He died in 2009, his family gave the building to the city, and it reopened as a museum in September 2010. Two floors plus a basement cover 420 square metres, with the best bathroom at the centre of the house. Outside, a park displays historical outhouses and statues of people squatting.
Sources: The Korea Herald, Wikipedia
Dog Collar Museum, Leeds Castle, Kent
More than 130 collars hang in the castle's medieval gatehouse, which Leeds Castle describes as the largest collection of its kind on public display. Gertrude Hunt gave the first batch, over 60 European collars from the 16th to the 19th century, to the Leeds Castle Foundation in 1977 in memory of her husband, the historian John Hunt. The oldest is a late-15th-century Spanish iron mastiff collar, spiked outwards so wolves and boar couldn't reach the dog's throat. Later pieces are engraved silver, gilt or red velvet, and the 20th-century ones are made from tyre rubber and beads.
Sources: Leeds Castle
Four of the ten are free to enter. One has already closed, which is a reasonable argument for going sooner rather than later.
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