Book Review: The Museum Dose: 12 Experiments in Pharmacologically Mediated Aesthetics, Written by Daniel Tumbleweed, Published 2015.
As a fellow psychonaut and art historian, I couldn’t help but find a kinship with the author and their approach to enhance the aesthetic experience. By cracking open each of the senses for a unique reception of one, Daniel traverses the city’s contemporary art offerings on various synthetic and organic psychedelic substances. This book can read like a dare, a fast and joyful read, ribbing you to pair your favorite entheogen with a cultural experience of various outcomes, or at the very least approach life’s mundanity with the same joie de vivre as the author.
While it might be an inclination to call this a psychedelic or an art themed book, it was a very honest exploration of what being an adult in the 21st century is like. Materialism has dissolved and the only thing of value is enlightenment and enrichment. What was once tangible is representational in the digital sphere.
The author recounts 12 different cultural experiences carefully curated alongside the substance of their personal choosing. Many of these interactions take place in New York City, like Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings with 18mg 2c-t-2, a psychedelic phenethylamine and Kraftwerk 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 with 10 mg 2ce, another type of synthetic dreamt up and actualized by Alexander Shulgin, chemist and author of PiKHAL and TiKHAL. However, there are a couple experiences that take place in more rural areas to demonstrate the range of applications of the museum dose experience. Daniel takes us through cathedrals, museums, train rides, and dusty desert storms to exhume glimmers of light in the otherwise vast landscapes of harsh humanity, spirituality, and a genuinely good time.
To the experienced reader, this can feel like a familiar journey; awaiting the come up, peaking hallucinations with visual and aural delight, or the accompanying and inevitable tears as one is moved to emotion. I also appreciate the NY bitchiness that can only be directed towards art critique in a loving-cynical, but you could have done better things with your time, kind of way. These excursions, in practice, are not for the entheogenic teetotaler or microdoser. The delicate, nuanced approach to perfecting the “museum dose”, aka “just enough--not too much,” requires a deft leap into a familiar abyss. For the experienced and inexperienced psychedelic explorer alike, The Museum Dose, can serve as inspiration or enlightenment to the different sensations, dosages, and potentially practical or fun applications of their own choosing.