The Museum Gift Shop

Saturday, October 24th, 2015

The most important tool for the diffusion and understanding of art in the modern world, Alain de Botton argues, is the gift shop:

Though it appears to be a mere appendage to most museums, the gift shop is central to the project of art institutions. Its job is to ensure that the lessons of the museum — which concern beauty, meaning and the enlargement of the spirit — can endure in the visitor far beyond the actual tour of the premises and be put into use in daily life.

The means deployed, however, are rarely on target.

[...]

That said, gift shops will rarely sell us actual reproductions of works; fake, copy, pastiche, forgery. Many of the most bitter insults of the art world are designed to denigrate anything which is not the actual product of the master’s hand. We’ve uncritically absorbed the idea that copies are worthless, deeply embarrassing kitsch. The nightmares of curators and gallery directors are haunted by copies. Hang a reproduction by mistake and your career is over. But why? Why are copies always supposed to be terrible? Even asking this straightforward question is suspect. Sometimes, of course, a copy truly violates the original. It mucks up all the details, it gets proportions weirdly wrong, the colours become garish. But not always. What if it’s a really good copy? What if the details are faithful? What if the shapes are harmonious and the colours lovely? A well-made reproduction can carry 99% of the meaning of the original. And maybe that’s all that really matters to us.

We’ve come to think that art belongs in art galleries and thereby condemned ourselves to encountering works at times dictated by museum opening hours and holiday schedules.

[...]

Art works have therapeutic power. But usually this passes us by. Not because we are insensitive or unworthy. But for a more basic reason. Their messages are hitting us at the wrong time — at moments when we’ve no need of them — like adverts for winter coats on the first day of spring. Copying is one much-needed solution to this problem, because copies allow us to locate these important, beneficial images in the places where we can encounter them in our times of need.

In the absence of copies, gift shops will sell us a lot of signed tea towels. They have discovered that people will buy objects heavily decorated with names of artists and their works: so we have Picasso table mats and Hepworth pencils.

Comments

  1. Bruce says:

    ‘All the best I know by copies,’ wrote Edward Leer after viewing the Vatican Museum.

  2. Alrenous says:

    If you can hang copies in your house then you don’t need to go to the museum. Qui bono, kto koro etc. Even free museums get prestige from visitor population magnitudes.

    Most digital copies are not distinguishable without e.g. chemical analysis of the ink. They’re so good as to be a window through space and/or time.

  3. Eli says:

    A tradition of stigmatizing and punishing copyright infringement? Creative types get pretty touchy when faced with the prospect of someone not the creator benefiting in some way from a work?

  4. Pst 314 says:

    “Why are copies always supposed to be terrible?”

    Somewhat related thought: A museum may proudly display a work for many years, but the moment it is revealed to be a forgery — be it a Vermeer or an ancient sculpture — it is deemed worthless and is cast into the outer darkness, never to be seen again by any but scholars and students.

    The work is objectively no less beautiful than it was when it was thought to be authentic, and yet it is now deemed to be valueless.

    Artists who paint or sculpt in the style of a predecessor are not much respected, although much original art is trash: Jeff Koons? Roy Lichtenstein? Sharks in formaldehyde?

    Authentic originality would seem to be all.

    Similarly, in academia originality is valued over all else. Work which is not original is dismissed as derivative. Teaching is held in low esteem, in contrast to earlier times when educating the young was seen as a chief function, and perhaps the most important because new learning is valuable making a new generation of good citizens is indispensable.

Leave a Reply