Update: On his final day in the museum, Biswas has granted a stay of execution to the forty objects he has chosen from the collection. To save a piece, at least two people must speak up and make a case for it on his website, otherwise its fate will be determined on September 3^rd. 

On June 27th, artist Ansuman Biswas took up residence in the Gothic tower of the Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester, and like any good twenty-first century hermit, he’s writing a blog about it.

The Manchester Museum grew out of the natural curiosities collected by Victorian silk manufacturer John Leigh Phillips. Biswas, who was born in Calcutta and lives in London, has toured with Bjork and was an artist-in-residence with the Russian Space Agency in 2001. As the resident hermit, Biswas has over 4.5 million of the museum’s treasures at his disposal, each day writing a reflection on a single curio.

And then—unless his readers show they care for the object—he destroys it.

On July 6, the hermit presented the skull of an extinct hyena species. Manchester Museum curator Henry McGhie pleaded for its safety: “If the skull were to be lost or destroyed then you would be reducing peoples’ ability (both now and in the future) to answer questions about the world and that would be a loss.”

Biswas wrote back:

I am not asking what museums are generally supposed to do, or what they might do in an ideal world, or why they are ‘good’ and important.’ What I am interested in is what does this particular skull mean, and in what particular way does anyone access that meaning?

…I am not interested in being lectured at by someone who thinks I should be interested in something. I want to be inspired by someone’s enthusiasm. I’ll gladly listen to anyone who is clearly interested in what they are saying and believes it with their whole heart.

I believe scientists do a great disservice to themselves, and society at large, by pretending to some sort of bland, anonymous objectivity. As long as museums continue in that tone they will turn off many people or allow us to continue as passive vessels into which knowledge is to be poured.

For Biswas, museums represent a kind of “species memory” for human culture, where items have a relative and changeable importance. “The Museum is here as a public body precisely to hold in trust many of these objects. This public institution becomes an empty shell however, and may even become harmful, unless its purpose and strategy is publicly examined and renewed.”

As his artist-in-hermitage comes to and end, Biswas has offered himself as the final object to be claimed. He will announce his own fate on August 5.