D.C.’s latest gimmicky museum pop-up dares to ask the question: is it better to try to slay and flop than to have never tried to slay at all?

According to the Museum of Failure, it’s the former!

The museum is actually a traveling exhibit, and it’s coming to Georgetown next month. Starting on Sept. 8, the exhibit will take visitors through a graveyard of more than 130 commercial duds, like the Apple Newton, a 1993 messaging device that became a symbol of expensive but useless high-tech gear; and the late-90s Diet-Coke-and-coffee combo drink Coca-Cola Blak, which, in this author’s opinion, was a vanguard born into an era not yet ready to recognize its genius.

Other notable catastrophes include Colgate’s beef lasagna (self-explanatory) and Bic for Her — pens small enough for our tiny land hands to hold in our tiny lady fingers.

All of this is being set up in Georgetown Park, the retail development that was home to the erstwhile Pinball Museum and in 2022 actually housed dozens of experimental theater works as part of Capital Fringe. This is its second U.S. stop this year after premiering in Brooklyn in the spring.

The Museum of Failure launched in Sweden in 2017. It comes from organizational psychologist Samuel West, who founded it after working as a consultant for companies looking for climate solutions, according to his bio. The museum’s thesis, according to West, is that failures help us learn — a rather elementary adage many of us ignored on a motivational classroom poster in the fifth grade, but when dressed up by corporate speak and pop psychology, has become a revolutionary cornerstone of Silicon Valley startup culture. Commercial failures breed commercial innovation, and so on, and so forth.

“I want visitors to recognize that failure is an essential aspect of progress and innovation,” West said in a press release announcing the exhibit’s D.C. arrival.

After you’ve gone on the tour de terrible ideas, the trip culminates with a “confessional” where guests can add their own personal stories of failure on a sticky note to a wall, and feel better about themselves when they read how horribly other people have really f’ed something up.

The Museum of Failure exhibit will be located at 3270 M St. NW in Georgetown from Sept. 8-Dec. 10, and be open Wednesday-Sunday from 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Tickets go for $25 apiece (children under six are free) and can either be purchased online or at the door.