Page - 133 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

133 from grand Hotels to tiny treasures Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin, or The Taming by the Shrew The Grand Budapest Hotel is not the end of the story of Ander- son’s engagement with Viennese culture, but rather its opening chapter. After having been seduced by Zweig’s world of yester- day and turning it into a seductive, childlike paracosm, one “providing a secure fantasy location, forever accessible, always the same, protected from the outside world” (Firebrace 2014, 72–73), Anderson did not return for long to the apartment in Paris he has maintained since 2005 (Amsden 2007). On top of beginning work on his next film, the stop motion animation Isle of Dogs (2018), he accepted an invitation from Vienna’s Kunst- historisches Museum to participate in a special exhibition se- ries in which “remarkable creative individuals […] present their own personal selections of objects drawn from the museum’s historical collections” (“Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures Wes Anderson and Juman Malouf” 2018). Giv- en the importance of collecting to Anderson’s filmic aesthetics and the way his films “place disparate objects from various sites of popular culture in concert with each other to create anachro- nistic, unnatural worlds that can be considered quirky or whim- sical” (Wilkins 2018, 153), one can understand the museum’s decision to invite Anderson for their series, which was part of a larger effort to capitalize on the welcome global visibility Mu- seum Hours (2012, dir. Jem Cohen) brought the institution. That year, adjunct curator Jasper Sharp was tasked with establishing a new programme of talks and exhibitions on modern and con- temporary art, and as a result: [s]ince January 2012, the Kunsthistorisches Museum has been inviting leading figures from the world of Modern and Contemporary art to spend time at the museum and speak publicly about their responses to it. The list of past speakers includes Jeff Koons, Edmund de Waal, Nan Goldin, Tobias Meyer, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner, Sandy Nairne, Thomas Demand, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, David Dawson, Ugo Rondinone and many more. (“Talks” n.d.)