CONSUMER CULTURE

CUSTOMS OF THE COUNTRY

JUDITH MARTIN

Who says museum shops can't sell good taste to go?

Pssst!

The art pilgrim is arrested by a scrawny creature with an ingratiating smile who offers him an exact copy, at a bargain price, of whatever he has just been admiring. The torso of an Aphrodite? The head of a Chinese Buddha? The countenance of the Pieta? The golden figure of an Egyptian goddess? Sure.

Perhaps the museumgoer haughtily shakes himself free and goes on his way, or perhaps he lingers and succumbs. In either case, if he has truly fallen under the spell of a work of art, he probably feels both the longing to possess it and the shabbiness of settling for an imitation.

But suppose the merchant, instead of being an itinerant operating from the sidewalk, has a fine-arts degree and operates inside the museum as a member of its staff? Does that make buying imitation works of art more respectable?

Museum shops all over the country—there are 657 in the Museum Store Association—are doing the kind of thriving business of which traditional peddlars of scarabs and Mona Lisas never dared dream. The shops are rapidly expanding over the first floors of museums, as annexes to special exhibitions, into mail-order catalogues, and even out into the community in the form of branch boutiques. Some museum visitors actually skip seeing the collection and head right for the dry goods. A museum's wares have come to represent a certain standard of reliable quality, about the same as that of the croissant sandwiches, rose, and Harry Bertoia chairs in the museum restaurants.

There is, of course, no shortage of people who are appalled to find the dealers in knockoffs firmly established inside the temples. Greed and tastelessness are the usual charges, and a new line of products associated with a particular show always gets a sideswipe in the reviews. A clever critic might point out, for example, what a shame it was that the merchandise connected with the Vatican show couldn't have been blessed for added value.

Financially, however, objections to museum retailing are indefensible. The shops are here to stay because museumgoers want them—and they are therefore profitable. They attract souvenir hunters, modest collectors who have come to terms with the inaccessibility of the real objects of their desires, and anyone else who derives aesthetic pleasure, status, amusement, or reassurance from goods associated, directly or tenuously, with works of art. And most museums are glad to have the business.

"Whenever you hear a museum director take the attitude that a museum is strictly a place to learn and enjoy, not to shop, you may be sure that his museum is well endowed elsewhere," says the Museum Store Association's director of publications, Beverly Barsook.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an international leader in the merchandising field (its workers brag that there is no contest, in terms of craftsmanship, between their products and those of their nearest competitors at the Louvre and the British Museum), sales of goods, from earrings to bronze horses to scholarly publications, brought in $27,852,043 last year, for a net profit of $1,793,471. The gain from retailing is also an incentive to museums to lend their most valuable possessions, in spite of the dangers of travel and the disappointment to their own clientele, who find Gone Fishin' signs where they expected to find prize paintings or sculptures. The Egyptian Organization of Antiquities received all proceeds from Tut Stuff while the "Treasures of Tutankhamen" exhibit was in the United States between 1976 and 1979, although the $1,500 gilded statue of the goddess Selket, now $2,250, has since been bringing in money for the Metropolitan. The Vatican gets a percentage of the net income on products sold during the current cross-country tour of "The Papacy and Art."

Most museums in this country are hard up: federal subsidies and private donations are rarely sufficient to cover operating costs. Therefore, critics of museum stores are in the position of people who chastise a genteel poor relation, whose meager support they have been openly begrudging her for years, by telling her that she has lowered herself and disgraced the family by finally entering the work force.

To those who question whether an educational institution should be condoning a questionably educational but highly popular and profitable activity, a financial executive for a major museum is rumored to have said,"We're proud of our merchandising operation the way Yale is proud of its football team."

Philosophically, the rationale for opposing museum merchandising— that it reduces art to a commodity—is even more specious. Hasn't art always been merchandise to those who could afford it? Did anyone explain to the Medici that appreciation is a pure response that should be untainted by acquisitiveness? Must the response of the masses be purer than that of the great collectors?

To condemn copies, even to condemn only cheap copies that violate the original scale or materials, would deprive the student of his posters, slides, and casts, and the arbiters of art of their royalties from coffee-table books. Plaster casts and electrotype copies of major statues were featured in virtually all major museum collections until about the 1940s; the casts were produced by museum molding shops for sale to other institutions and to individuals. Then a great wave of disgust for copies swept through the art world, and the workshops closed. When museum stores began to diversify their stock beyond exhibition catalogues and postal cards about two decades ago, the reproduction studios reopened and the argument started afresh, as if no one had ever thought of condoning copies. Tastemakers, in this crowd, can be as relentless toward the past as they are uncompromising in the present.

We all know that there is a difference between culture and kitsch, but what is it?

No museum shop is offering Michelangelo's Pieta carvedfrom a three-inch bar of soap, but what about that remarkable soap-sculpture look that the original had when it was spotlighted at the 1964 World's Fair in New York for visitors who could only pass by it on a conveyor belt? The cast-marble "Head of the Virgin" from the Pieta now on sale at the Metropolitan for $150 (optional background display panel, $49.50) is certainly questionable, if not downright hilarious, but the exact molds of the statue from which it was made were also used to restore the Figure after it was mutilated by a vandal. One could always object to the reproduction of the head on the grounds that it is an excerpt from the complete work. But had the entire Pieta, save the head, been lost, you may be sure that the disembodied head would be displayed and venerated without criticism.

There is a real question, of course, about what constitutes the difference between the museum and the marketplace. The display of statues in the commercial heart of the city predates the public museum by many hundreds of years—and survives as the Henry Moore in the shopping mall. But museums seem more and more like department stores, and vice versa. We are now all too familiar with the crowded bustle of museums, where time-slotted tickets are necessary for popular shows, lingering is impossible, and wandering back for second looks sometimes forbidden. Yet shoppers who found their way behind Junior Dresses in Garfinckel's in Washington, D.C., were able, for six months, to enjoy paintings from the Phillips Collection at leisure, in calm, tasteful surroundings.

The Metropolitan is now showing several pieces from this season's Yves Saint Laurent collection as part of the exhibition "Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design," while Bloomingdale's, which routinely gives Saint Laurent display space, recently borrowed dresses more historic than his from a French costume museum for a revenueless exhibit.

Most of the people in the museum world are too smart to try to sort all this out. The foolhardy task is therefore left to the Internal Revenue Service, because one difference between a museum and a department store is that museums don't pay taxes on the income from everything they sell. The IRS's code is, as always, subject to interpretation by different auditors, and can only be clarified definitively through the courts, but the rule is that the product sold—if the profits are to be tax-exempt (no mean consideration in the economics of museum shops)—must be related to the exempt purpose of the nonprofit organization. That purpose, for museums, is to educate, rather than to spread aesthetic delight.

Have you ever seen an educational T-shirt? (No, that kind of education doesn't count.) The Smithsonian Institution, which has ten shops, stocks them, with blueprints of the space shuttle or diagrams of the constellations. The Metropolitan disdains T-shirts, but feels that printing designs from fans or vases or murals onto silk or wool challis, rather than cotton, producing a scarf rather than a T-shirt, is disseminating education, and at designer prices too. T-shirts could easily appear in a Contemporary American Costume exhibition, which would seem to make them educational, although the Smithsonian has decided not to push this line of reasoning with such items as Fonzie's leather jacket, digital watches, and pocket calculators. Occasionally museums get lucky and objects related to their exhibits come into fashion: the Smithsonian did a booming business in American Indian jewelry when Ralph Lauren was showing the Santa Fe look. One wonders whether or not the Metropolitan could now be selling the whole YSL line without being taxed.

Museum store managers, who have to fight their way to respectability among the curators and other colleagues whose more refined work they heftily support, have not even agreed among themselves upon definitions for their products. The Museum Store Association suggests dividing them into three categories: a replica is an exact copy in all dimensions and materials (known as a forgery if not properly labeled); a reproduction is something in which the scale or material or method of making has been altered (such as mass-produced versions of old silver); and an adaptation is a design from one type of object used on something different (a textile pattern used to make fancy wrapping paper, or jewelry copied from a painting).

The fastidious museum shopkeeper is, indeed, in the difficult position of trying to keep his museum afloat while protecting its good name. A museum's brand name (the educational value—and tax status—of which, on tote bags, has not been definitively determined) is most valuable as the imprint of good taste, whatever that is.

Usually, an effort is made to let the curators help decide. The reproduction staff (generally listed under Publications, either because it sounds more respectable or because the department started with paper goods) spots something it thinks, from previous sales or marketing research ("We're not L. L. Bean yet," said a Metropolitan staff member, "but we're getting there"), would sell. Or it spots a need, and goes digging in the unexhibited collection until it finds the corresponding original. If some combination of museum people agree that the idea is tasteful, and again that the final product is also tasteful, it goes into the shop with the museum's stamp of approval.

Naturally, this does not make such items acceptable in the homes of the tastemakers and their peers. The decree against copies is in effect until further notice. An imitation classical Greek torso on the coffee table is still the height of kitsch. And never mind that the classical Romans simply adored them.