An imagined museum, 2001
Welcome to the Met
A web artwork by Anjali Arora, documented in 2001.
The museum changes after closing time. Paintings that have spent the day on display begin talking to one another: about noisy crowds, the pleasure of being admired, and visitors who care more about sounding knowledgeable than looking closely.
That is the premise of Welcome to the Met, Anjali Arora's web artwork documented in 2001. Its imagined gallery has two distinct moods: the orderly presentation of pictures by day and the less polite conversations that begin at night.
The gallery by day
The surviving Gallery 1 page introduces a room of paintings labelled as dating from around 1542. A separate night-time introduction then changes the scene, inviting the visitor to return to the rooms after the paintings have come to life.
This change gives the project its comic point of view. Objects usually described by curators and visitors get to comment on the people looking at them.
After closing time
In the preserved night-time conversation, one painting complains about the crowds while another enjoys its celebrity. Their discussion turns to fashionable visitors and rehearsed art criticism. The exchange brings informal speech into a setting normally associated with restraint and expertise.
The contrast is already present in the archived pages: a quiet gallery, followed by the paintings' complaints and rivalries. It gives a reader a concrete way into the work before following the remaining rooms.
Explore the archived scenes
Start with the project entrance, compare the daytime gallery with the night-time introduction, then read the Gallery 1 conversation. The captures below preserve these separate parts of the sequence. The entrance also records the original recommendation to use Internet Explorer 4 or later, a reminder of the browser environment in which the project was made.