Are we responsible to the originals when we develop products for our museum stores?

“Turning High art into cheap products” writes Peter Aspden. June 2012. The Financial Times

In The Financial Times on Saturday June 23^rd, Peter Aspden wrote a powerful critique about the relationship between the value of art and the devaluation thereof in “art-related products”.  Quoting Francis Bacon “ The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery” Aspden follows on “Who will now believe the words of Bacon when they can be read on a blue-and-beige €320 cashmere throw?”

In my dealings with museum shops over some twenty years, every buyer has declared earnest responsibility to the aims and values of the museums which they represent. And yet, having spent the last three months visiting around twenty museum stores in the UK and Washington, Philadelphia and New York, I fear that many of these stores do actually fail in these aspirations in their product selection. They actually ridicule the original work, in many cases, through cheap product quality and woefully poor repro accuracy.

Ten years ago, one could always look to the US for best practice in museum store product selection, but today, from the sites which I visited, that claim cannot be justified. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, surely the original and best, now disappoints as a retail experience. An excellent selection of books, and textiles both inspire and inform but the gift products are pedestrian and some are downright inappropriate. How can you claim to respect the art and understand the power of art to inspire when you simply plonk an image on a 2 x 3” plastic luggage tag or cut a great hole in the image and print it on an incomprehensible product called an “Eyelight”? The great Philadelphia Museum of Art has a shop team which has decided that their paintings are best redefined on lenticular plastic postcards and fridge magnet sets. Perhaps most heinously the Foulger Library offers an astoundingly cheap black plastic box with a little photograph of the First Folio frontispiece  stuck on the lid. In a number of different sites a charming collection of product related to a single image make a retail “story”.  In most cases the discrepancy of repro quality invalidates the display. Is it not the buyer’s job to know that different materials take print in a differing way ? And one print will differ from another print from a different supplier. On precious few products is there any information about the artists and the collection. Perhaps that is a relief.

The great digital revolution and print on demand solutions now all provide a myriad of products with your chosen image. The Bridgeman Art Library boasts over 100,000 images and allows you to see your selected image on any number of products. Now you can go on line and model the picture you want to see on a mug, bag or placemat. Does that mug come with a certificate which explains who is the artist, where is the picture hanging and advises how close the colour of the print on the mug is to the original?

Aspden presents such as the “consumer’s banal checklist of trinkets” and such museums can certainly justify their product selection on the grounds of income and profitability. But let us aspire to a better thing. Can we not work towards better stores which inspire, inform and stimulate as well as generating great income for their museum?  Can we respect what Aspden defines as the “artist’s yearning for transcendence” in merchandise which is sufficiently appealing to fill the museum shop coffers?  To my mind we can at least try and the solutions are three fold:  1) designing or supplying products of genuine originality - themselves achieving transcendence through material and aesthetic satisfaction. Of course this will be a struggle and open to individual taste/prejudice but some “art-related products” are actually original pieces. Donald Stein’s legendary “History of Art” T-shirt, Rob Fishbone’s  inflatable “Scream” or Cary Bryant’s inspired “Dress up David” magnet set are all exceptional original ideas inspired by art. 2) Products inspired by the works in the collection - Vivienne Westwood and Gianni Versace following the manner of the original master, Piero Fornasetti, create original works using pattern and decoration from history. 3) yes - creating souvenirs from your artworks with care. A 2” x 3” fridge magnet or even a 4” x 6” postcard of an enormous historical narrative is absurd, but a 2” x 3” image of a vase/jug with sunflowers or a portrait works a treat. Why? because the scale and detail can tell the truth of the work accurately. If the historical narrative is the most popular image in the collection, select details for your pick up lines or develop products which allow you to project the scale responsibly. The National Portrait Gallery in London boasts a range of standard fridge magnets simply with a quote in a standard typeface on a plain seemingly irrelevant coloured background. The NGA in Washington offers quotes on a much more interestingly shaped magnet with a portrait of the quote-sayer. A much more imaginative solution for a “portrait” gallery and in this case, ironically, from the same magnet manufacturer.

As a museum there is a demand to inform as well as inspire. To that end is it not incumbent upon the museum to see each product sold as a platform for further knowledge and interest? All it needs is a few words stating title, dates and artist as well as some link to the collection and to more information about the piece. Every museum related souvenir without at least this is a wasted opportunity.

What can then be done to resolve this? The route to success here must come from the top. In many circumstances the institutions have become, frankly, lazy. It is much easier to buy in an existing supplier’s OK new product than it is to challenge them to make it a great product. In many cases the buyers pay lip service to the responsibility, but they come from the high street and are much more interested in gross margin and minimum orders rather than responsibility to the work of a great artist. There needs to be a common presentation protocol on all products driven by the ambition to say as much as possible about the work, the artists and the institution. There needs to be one agreed scan for every picture with a match print against which every subsequent print must be measured. The buyer needs to be driven to deliver the appropriate gross margin and commercial imperative but know about the work, their responsibilities to their collection and to the artists therein who strived to reach such expression and who “yearned for transcendence” . It can be done. More visitors will leave with better products which can inspire and inform all who subsequently come across them, and in doing so the museum coffers will grow ever more full.

Ian Peter MacDonald  - July 2012