A Meditation on the Museum Gift Shop

Cover Image: Shoppers Browse The MoMA Design Store, via store.moma.org 

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I ended my visit to the MoMA this past spring with an expected stop by the museum gift shop. After browsing through the stations of colorful and eccentric memorabilia, I left with a poster, a pin, and a postcard of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand. I had not come across the piece during my visit, but I thought the card was too good to leave behind, reluctantly rejecting my self-imposed rule to only buy merchandise showing off artworks that I have seen and admired in person. I had come up with this rule as I thought a proper art lover would not simply buy a poster or postcard because they thought it looked nice, but rather to keep a tangible record of art with which they had had a meaningful connection. I was sure that the postcards I had found in my parents’ and grandmother’s scrapbooks had been bought with intention, surely not because they simply looked pretty. I had thought that in this way I would escape the superficiality of the museum-goer who values gift shop goods over the artworks that are printed all over them. Yet this time I left with merchandise that I would have thought a proper art lover would be ashamed of, feeling no shame at all, and I realized that there is no way to leave a museum gift shop having achieved something profound. The concept of the gift shop is as superficial as it gets and one must simply embrace it and their consumerism, or reject it altogether—although regrettably missing out on a mug of Van Gogh’s Starry Night or a Frida Kahlo jigsaw puzzle. 

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I do not mean to say that one cannot have a meaningful connection to a souvenir. As with any loved object, the more one uses it, looks at it, and ages with it, the more attached to it one becomes. But the unique case presented by the gift shop good is that it is marketed as a sentimental reminder of a cultural experience, while it blatantly commercializes the museum and its art. In a time of excited, anxious materialism, museums and their customers seem to have found a mutually beneficial relationship in the enterprise of the gift shop: as the busy people of our time are less able to observe and read about art, the gift shop’s accessible imagery becomes a surface that replaces the substance behind this art. It is a sad truth of our time that museums would be much less popular without rewarding their visitors with images that they will always be able to access, that they have the security of owning, and that act as evidence of a timeless culture—or at least the surface that remains among the masses today. Through its gift shop, the museum garners a profit that efficient modern life cannot offer purely in ticket sales. The museum gift shop places consumerism at its core and those who had known art before its polyester replicas would not hesitate to call it supremely superficial. 

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The way I see it, there is no use in arguing whether the museum shop is superficial because it certainly is. However, my gift shop visit made me realize that there might not be anything wrong with being a superficial shopper. In the museum gift shop, you can’t shop in any other way; you either see the place as frivolous, kitsch, overpriced, and overcrowded, or you ignore all skepticism the moment you show interest in the objects for sale. At that moment, you choose the option in which a canvas tote bag can be valued at $28.00 because it has a Basquiat painting printed on it, and you are obliged to ignore both the bag’s ridiculous price and the ridiculous underestimation of the artwork. Is a Basquiat only worth $28.00 to its modern audience, replicated on a tote bag that will carry the groceries or beach essentials of those who want the world to know that they know who Basquiat is, that they’ve seen his work in a museum, and New York City’s MoMA of all places (as is revealed to the similarly cultivated by the subtle MoMA tag on the seam of the bag)? At that moment, you paradoxically forget both your conscience as a respecter of high art and the existence of more humble bags, ones that would carry your groceries just as well but that do not have such an appearance of culture. You embrace frivolity and kitsch because in that moment it truly does not matter. There is no real morality in a place of all surface and no substance.

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Perhaps then there is no use in opposing the museum gift shop: as a necessary part of the modern museum, it will always be there despite any adversaries’ accusations of low taste and low morality. Rejecting the gift shop and its superficiality has come to mean rejecting the industry that makes the viewing of art accessible. It can maybe then be seen as one’s responsibility as a supporter of art and accessible art to appreciate the value of the gift shop. I thus urge those who do not accept its superficiality to change their perspective (and, those who believe that their abstinence entitles them to a certain arrogance, their attitude). In an era where modern art is inevitably tied to consumerism (whether because it critiques consumerism or because it is consumed itself), the objects of the gift shop may be seen as objects of modern art themselves. Perhaps instead of replicating or even honoring existing art, museums use the imagery of their displayed works to create objects of a new art. Indeed, a rectangular vase decorated with a Mondrian grid or a miniature mobile inspired by Calder are objects that have been created with an artistic vision in mind. (The MoMA prides itself on its innovative shop, which is, in fact, called the Design Store for that very reason. Both of these objects can be found in the Design Store.) More ordinary items, like a tote bag or a postcard, are still products of artistic decisions; whether they are ridiculously overpriced or underpriced, artful or kitsch, they are objects that someone has designed and invested in. As objects, they have transformed the art they are meant to commemorate, and can be thought of as independent from it. In fact, they have value only because they are separated from this art, because they can be used in a way we could never use fine art: a mug of Van Gogh’s Starry Night will never come close to the greatness of the painting itself—nor does it claim to—but you get to drink your coffee out of it.

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While I was a skeptic of gift shop superficiality, I now cannot see gift shops as problematic. As an art lover, I want to see art and artists respected, and I am saddened by the notion of art turned into merchandise, carelessly flung about to the point where it becomes a mere icon. But I understand that the gift shop must exist. Respect for art is not the rejection of the gift shop, but genuine understanding of original, immutable, irreplicable work. Perhaps one can see the gift shop as highlighting the brilliance of real art, or, one can see it as creating new art itself. But one must understand that it is separate from the art it seeks to commemorate because it will never come close to it. Gift shops’ primary inspiration is artwork that occupies an untouchable status, that is the very image of profoundness. Such an image cannot live, unchanged, on a bag or kitchen utensil. I now find comfort in the knowledge that these objects are only as superficial as they have to be. And I encourage those who resent the notion of the gift shop to reconsider their position. Gift shops are inherently superficial and arguing about why or how is futile. Perhaps loosening up a little, embracing unavoidable, shameless superficiality, will open skeptics’ eyes to an array of intriguing objects, some of which would even meet their artistic standards. 

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