Shopping around

The V&A once famously advertised itself it as 'an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached.' This, rightly, caused some consternation as, if the cafe is better than the collections, what is the point of a museum? But, nonetheless, the facilities provided by museums and galleries are becoming increasingly important, part of what frames visits and encourages their repetition. I will never understand museums that put shops and restaurants on the other side of the ticket desk as this puts off visitors who might come for a coffee and stay for an exhibition.

I promised a post on museum shops when I was in the US over the summer, and was reminded of this again on my current trip to Denver. In general, I think museum shops in the US are more successful, and my latest purchase confirmed this for me. Artist Sean Miller has gone to a series of international museums taking pictures of dust and creating a set of these beautiful badges in colour-coded boxes. This one is from the Hermitage in St Petersburg, but many were from US institutions, including the Denver Art Museum where I bought it, but not, as far as I could see, from any British ones. This reminded me of the piece of 'art' I was able to buy from a vending machine on Frankfurt station. Both are quirky and fun momentos of my visits. I think museum shops are successful that offer well-designed products that remind you of the collections, allow you to feel like you're taking a piece of your own collection home, but don't merely offer you tat, or even expensive, reproductions of the exhibits. The V&A is good at this in Britain, the British Museum less so.

There is, of course, also always a place for a good range of art books, although I often wonder how high the turn over is on these. What irritates me most in almost every museum is the postcard selection. It is predictable that whatever painting or object has most appealed to me will not be available as a postcard. In general I find the selections from both exhibitions and permanent galleries to be I imaginative, I was, also, mystified by a number of E Coast US Museums that sold no individual postcards, only pre-selected books on such themes as 'Women' and 'Landscape.' Of course museum visitors invariably have cameras now and can take their own reasonable quality photos of paintings at least, but there is nothing like a beautifully lit postcard. Surely in this digital age some system could be developed for print on demand postcards, as most collections have images of their collections online anyway. This is the simplest way of allowing visitors to take a piece of their experience home with them.

One of Sean Miller’s Create and Wear Dust Abstractions