The very idea of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum is an affront to museums everywhere. It's a smudge on the pristine, glass-caged, roped-off world of traditional galleries. The place is nothing more, or less, than a university campus where all the art just happened to get lost. A pox on French art theorist André Malraux for dreaming up the absurd concept of a museum without walls! What was he thinking? In an audacious blurring of boundaries, or perhaps an inability to distinguish between an exhibition and a misplaced storage room, the Plattsburgh State Art Museum sprawls across the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, littering the campus with its 4,600 plus works of art and artifacts. Don't be fooled into imagining a vast, sprawling expanse of cultural treasure: it could just as easily be the largest ongoing yard sale in North America. On campus, you can stumble over art in the strangest places, perhaps even in your dorm room. Rumor has it, a 15th century Ming vase was recently found serving as a beer mug at a fraternity party. Art does not belong to a hallowed hall where it can be revered from a respectful distance. No, at Plattsburgh State Art Museum, it is scattered pell-mell across three main galleries, a sculpture court, various exhibition areas, possibly even the bathrooms (though this could not be confirmed at the time of writing). Here you won’t find polite gallery attendants ready to hush you and prevent you from taking flash photographs. Here, in this postmodern Pandora’s Box, you are expected to engage with the art, perhaps trip over it, spill coffee on it, or use it as a makeshift umbrella. This smacks of an amazing ignorance of how high art should be treated - tucked safely behind velvet ropes or encased, Hannibal Lecter-style, behind glass with just the bare minimum of air holes. At this museum, they have the audacity to suggest that it’s all part of their mission to widely disseminate the visual arts on campus, encouraging not only in-depth study but also casual encounters with art. The audacity, to make art accessible, with no apparent concern that this dilutes its lofty status! Plattsburgh State Art Museum, with your evidently laid-back attitude to curatorial standards, you are either a leader in redefining what we consider a museum or a symbol of ultimate confusion between an art repository and a lost property office. Fair warning to artists who might consider having their works displayed here: be sure to stash a GPS locator on your pieces. You never know where they might wind up - a latte-soaked desk in the student union, perhaps, or accessorizing a theatrical performance in the drama department. It seems the adage 'Art is everywhere' has been taken far too literally by the gentle, misguided art enthusiasts at Plattsburgh State. Let us ask André Malraux, from beyond the grave, is this what you had in mind when you said 'museum without walls'? A whole university campus to misplace your art? These are indeed strange times, dear reader, strange times indeed.