One hundred years ago, in a mood of revolutionary zeal, Kasimir Malevich proclaimed Russia the centre of political life, “the breast against which the entire power of the old-established states smashes itself”. The sentiment appeared in his polemic, 'On the Museum' (1919), a paean to the transformation of contemporary life, offset by a denouncement of the museum as a retrograde cultural institution filled with “dead baggage – the depraved cupids of the former debauched houses of Rubens and the Greeks”. Notwithstanding the summoning of an improbable mammary metaphor, an association between museums and their historically necessary annihilation was set.