The Other Art Market

Damien Hirst Kiki Smith Takashi Murakami Matthew Barney Pierre Auguste Renoir Cai Guo Qiang Lorenzo Ghiberti Vincent van Gogh

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When visitors exited the final room of paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 2007 exhibition of Renoir landscapes, they discovered that the show did not end there. Instead, they stepped into a gift shop filled with items evocative of Renoir’s paintings. The artist’s vibrant color palette was splashed onto floral aprons and coats, and his winsome pictures of dancing couples were reproduced in a black-and-white book inviting users to Color Your Own Renoir Paintings. No longer limited to exhibition catalogues, postcards and magnets, the museum guests tried on scarves and jewelry, considered sets of plates and matching napkins and spritzed eau de toilette on test strips adorned with the artist’s signature.

It’s the kind of scene that might make purists turn the other way: the rarefied world of fine art transformed into a vast array of commercial merchandise and trinkets for mass consumption. Yet even these critics might have to admit that, like many museumgoers, they have stopped to leaf through a book, or maybe even purchase a keychain or soap that is only vaguely suggestive of the art on display. If the beauty of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise takes us to a higher plane, then the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gold-plated angel ornaments derived from that masterpiece’s Adam and Eve relief remind us that it’s time to shop for the holidays. If Takashi Murakami’s “superflat” paintings and sculptures wow us with their wildness as well as their multimillion-dollar price tags, then his $35 plush toys and $98 flower pillows serve as art for hipsters on a budget.

“Having an impact that goes far beyond the handful of collectors who can afford his most important paintings and sculptures is enormously important for Takashi, and he dedicates a great deal of effort to it,” says Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, who explored the issue of mass-marketing art-related merchandise in the museum’s ©Murakami show. The traveling exhibition—now at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, in Frankfurt, where it remains through January 4—famously, and controversially, includes a Louis Vuitton boutique stocked with fanciful designs by the Japanese superstar. The exhibit also showcases the Kaikai Kiki Merchandise Display Room, an installation of some 500 objects produced by Murakami’s Tokyo-based corporation, Kaikai Kiki. “It may not be the high altar I pray to, but in terms of reach, without this complete interweaving [of the retail and art worlds], we wouldn’t know who Murakami is today,” says the curator. “I’m an elitist, and he’s not. I like Bugatti—he’s like Henry Ford.”

Whichever camp a museumgoer belongs to, art-related merchandise has a definite appeal that makes it, for a number of institutions, a vital source of income and publicity (think of all those posters in dorm rooms). The Met’s retail operation, in fact, began as a way to publicize its inaugural exhibition, in 1872; the museum hired a Parisian engraver to create etchings of 10 paintings, sets of which were sold for $20 to $25. By 1914, the Met was selling plaster casts of small sculptures, having realized that scholars and students weren’t the only ones interested in copies of its artworks. Its merchandising has since evolved into a business that, in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, brought in an astounding $41 million profit on revenues of nearly $81 million.

Anthony Calnek, who served as head of the Guggenheim’s publishing, communications and retail merchandising division from 2000 to 2006, notes that the Met, which he calls the “gold standard,” paved the way for other institutions to explore new retail avenues. “It showed how a museum starts to expand, and it did so aggressively and successfully,” he says. Although few can match the scale of the Met’s operations, which include 36 satellite stores throughout the country and the world, a mail-order catalogue and online store, the numbers can still be significant. In Calnek’s final year at the Guggenheim, the institution reported a profit of $3.2 million from retail and publications on gross sales of $9.2 million. The tax filings of L.A. MoCA, meanwhile, show net earnings from “bookstore sales” reaching nearly $1.5 million in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, compared with $629,088 the year earlier. “People talk about impurity— this gray area of merchandise,” says Schimmel. “Museum shops have become enormously powerful.”