Provenance

Gallery II · Custody, curatorship, and conservation

Provenance of the Record

In the manner of any object of significance, this record has a history of custody. That history is short, because the record has only ever been in one pair of hands, and the hands have not changed. It is set down here in full regardless, on the principle that a provenance is no less a provenance for being uneventful.

9 Nov 2001

The event occurs. The record exists at this point only as memory, held by the curator, uncatalogued.

2001 – 2025

The record remains in private custody, unpublished, and is reviewed by the curator at irregular intervals, chiefly without prompting.

24 Apr 2025

The domain fuckyouelonmusk.lol is acquired for $2.78 and pointed at nothing, in anticipation of an eventual use not yet determined.

2 Feb 2026

The record is published, accessioned as CCC.2026.001, and placed on continuous public view. Custody does not change. It has simply become visible.

No part of this record has been loaned, sold, gifted, seized, or restituted. There are no gaps in the provenance. There is, in fairness, very little provenance in which a gap could occur.

The Wider Holdings

The Maple Milk Incident does not stand alone. It belongs to a small network of permanent records maintained by the same curator, each concerning a separate matter and each held to the identical standard of register.

• onionmadder.com — The Onion Madder Archives The principal and senior collection. Larger in scope, graver in subject, and the parent body under which the present Collection understands itself to operate.
• A companion record concerning a separate individual Maintained at an address of similar construction, regarding a separate grievance of comparable magnitude. The two records do not coordinate and have never met.
• The present Collection One curator, one register, one bottle. The smallest holding by every measure, and the one most fully documented.

Curator's Statement

Onion Madder is the founder, curator, registrar, docent, conservator, and sole visitor-services staff of the Concord Curatorial Collection. She has held each of these positions since the Collection's establishment and has at no point been considered for promotion.

She holds no formal training in curatorial practice. The Collection regards this as immaterial to a holding of this size and has declined to pursue accreditation on the grounds that the relevant bodies do not maintain a category for it. She is qualified to maintain this record by virtue of having been present at the event, by virtue of having remembered it without interruption for twenty-five years, and by virtue of being the only living person who considers it worth the trouble.

The curator is, by the design of the institution, unreachable. This is not an oversight. A record of this nature is improved by the absence of a complaints procedure.

Conservation Notes

This record is constructed of plain HTML and a single stylesheet. It contains no JavaScript, no database, no fonts that must be fetched, and no dependency that can lapse, expire, or be discontinued by a third party. It is intended to remain legible, without intervention, for not less than two hundred years.¹

The principal object, being milk, was not a candidate for physical conservation and was deaccessioned by consumption in 2001 (see Visit, Accession No. CCC.2001.001). What is conserved here is therefore not the object but the account of it, which the curator submits is the more durable of the two and was always going to outlast the milk.

Acknowledgments

The Collection records its thanks, in no order of precedence, to the following:

• Garelick Farmsfor the milk, which was not at fault.
• The maintenance staff of the Cumberland Farms on N. Main Streetwho kept the only door in working order, and who are not implicated in any way.
• The unnamed inventor of the postdated checkwithout whose contribution the incident would have taken a different and lesser form.
• The cashierwho processed both transactions without comment, and whose composure the curator has come, in time, to admire.
• The doorfor being the only one, and so for making the departure unambiguous.