museum piece

noun

1. something suitable for keeping and exhibiting in a museum.

2. something very old-fashioned or decrepit.

   That car he drives is a museum piece.

museum piece

noun

1. an object of sufficient age or interest to be kept in a museum

2. informal,  a person or thing regarded as antiquated or decrepit

Word History and Origins

Origin of museum piece¹

First recorded in 1900–05

Idioms and Phrases

An elderly or old-fashioned item or person, as in When are you going to sell that museum piece of a car? or Aunt Jane comes from another era—she's a real museum piece. This expression originated about 1900 for an article valuable enough for museum display but began to be used disparagingly from about 1915.

Example Sentences

Seeing that one figure treated as a museum piece felt like a half-hearted wave to fans who grew up with Chuck.

From Los Angeles Times

The result is a legal and institutional landscape where the Voting Rights Act stands more as a museum piece than a living instrument.

From Slate

Jordan Libowitz - from the organisation Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington - said any use of the plane by Trump after leaving office would cross a line: "Reagan's Air Force One ended up in his presidential library, but there's a difference there. The plane was decommissioned, Reagan never flew on it again, and it sits inside as a museum piece."

From BBC

A good opera “speaks to something specific about the human condition, and isn’t just some dull, remote, inscrutable museum piece,” he told Salon.

From Salon

Sherman also said that "we're not cooking like it's 1491. We're not a museum piece of something like that. We're trying to evolve the food into the future, using as much of the knowledge from our ancestors that we can understand and just applying it to the modern world."

From Salon