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Most of the time, museums are spaces for great pieces of art, centuries-old artefacts, or celebrating the best of culture and history. The Museum of Failure, as you may have guessed from the name, works a little differently.
This travelling exhibition takes all the most underwhelming and disappointing moments from recent history and shoves them into a room, forcing us to contend with the true mediocrity of humanity. From that somewhat bleak description, it won’t surprise you to find out that it was created by a British man, and in 2026 he’s finally bringing it home for the first time ever.
Creator Dr Samuel West told the Guardian that the response that the museum receives varies greatly across oceans and cultures, but that he’s confident that Brits are the natural audience for his project, thanks to ‘our black humour and our support of the underdog’.
While Americans laughed and ‘just didn’t get it when I tried to tell them that sometimes… there’s no happy ending’, West says that we in Britain have a ‘dark awareness that things can just go horribly wrong’.
And plenty of the objects in West’s collection are examples of just that. Some are funny – think tech flops like the Google Glass, doomed food creations like Heinz purple ketchup and an American $2 bill that never caught on. An entire section is now dedicated to useless AI, and another for general concepts that make you go ‘what were they thinking?’.
Other exhibits, however, tell much darker stories, such as the tools used to perform lobotomies in the 1900s, or the investors that made money by buying life insurance policies off people and just hoping they’d kick the bucket quickly.
In terms of British representation, there are some pretty big hitters in the Museum of Failure. The Titanic, the Body Shop and Brexit are just a few of our home-grown flops to make the cut.
The museum is currently in Paris until May 16, and there are no confirmed dates as to when it will cross the Channel, or where in the country it’s heading. However, it did say in a recent Instagram post that it is ‘looking forward to arriving in the UK later this year’, so it should touch down before 2026 is over.
Follow the museum on Instagram here for updates on when and where it will appear in the UK.
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