Filmmaker and pizza parlor owner Phil Hartman is planning to open a Museum of the Counterculture in New York's East Village. From the New York Times:
Mr. Hartman said he wanted the museum to contain archives, exhibition galleries and theater spaces. The idea is to celebrate not just luminaries who crossed over to the mainstream, like Warhol, Basquiat and Blue Man Group, but the poets, filmmakers, musicians and artists for whom life in the East Village has been part of the performance. He will not yet reveal the locations he has scouted for the museum but said a temporary exhibition space will be open within two years.
Mr. Hartman, an entrepreneur whose main form of transportation is his bicycle, is not oblivious to the paradox of his ambition. "The idea of institutionalizing downtown culture obviously has inherent contradictions in it," he acknowledged. "The counterculture isn't dead but it needs some institutions to keep it alive."
Avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas–founder of Anthology Film Archives, the Filmmakers' Cooperative, and Film Culture magazine–was invited to be one of the first inductees into the proposed Museum's Hall of Fame.
"I object!" said Mr. Mekas, looking both dapper and frail at 82, but sounding fiery. "We are not counterculture. We in the East Village are the culture and everything around us is the opposite of culture. Counter is the mass that is called culture, but it is really the shopping-counter culture. I'm very much opposed to this term counterculture."
