The Other Art Market

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

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

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.”

It’s a power earned through lots of creative work behind the scenes. Special exhibition items represent the enterprise of the museum’s own merchandising and marketing wizards, who aim to translate high art into saleable mementos. For “Art and Love in Renaissance Italy,” opening November 18 at the Met, the exhibition curator Andrea Bayer and the product-development team met several times to discuss marriage and courtship during this era. “[Bayer] talked about the dowry for the bride, the use of quotations in some of the art and the key works and themes in the exhibition,” says Valerie Troyansky, a nearly 30-year veteran of the Met, who oversees product development there. Troyansky’s corps of some 45 developers, buyers and production staff spent more than a year creating objects that relate to the show, which includes paintings and drawings of amorous subjects and celebratory items for weddings and pregnancies, ranging from wedding rings to birth trays.

The result: a mix of jewelry (a locket, a silver pendant and a bracelet incorporating quotations from the period); textiles (velvet scarves, lacework and pillows); and items for the home (picture frames and a majolica pitcher) that capture the traditions and romance of Renaissance Italy. Producing some items required both scholarship and trend savvy, like selecting a fragrance from Santa Maria Novella, the Florentine perfume manufacturer founded in 1621, that would appeal to contemporary women while still being redolent of that storied age.

When Stuart Gerstein, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s director of wholesale and retail operations, is not consulting with curators about exhibition images and motifs or discussing packaging and marketing, he is attending gift, fashion and accessory trade shows—up to 10 a year—in search of outside products pertinent to upcoming shows. “I’ll be walking through with this idea of, say, Renoir and the French landscape, and I’m looking for things that I think can support that theme,” he says. It was at a fashion-accessory show that he ran into a hatmaker who suggested velvet chapeaus with floral appliqués for “Renoir Landscapes.” During the exhibition’s three-month run, the museum sold 760 of them, priced at $48, and felt berets, at $40 a piece.

Jewelry is the Met’s largest retail area, representing about 25 percent of total sales, says David Wargo, the museum’s general merchandise manager. The business began in 1877, when it contracted with Tiffany & Co. to manufacture and sell copies of Cypriot jewelry in its collection.

For its Frida Kahlo survey this past spring, the Philadelphia Museum of Art enlisted a jeweler to make an elaborate sterling-silver necklace like the one the artist wears in her 1940 Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird. The price: $4,375. Among the other Kahlo merchandise were embroidered wool jackets, hand-painted wood bowls and paper flowers from Mexico fashioned from cornstalks. “The store was blue, like Frida’s house,” says Gerstein, who traveled to Mexico City to see her work and to negotiate licensing rights.

Not all shows have the luxury of a dedicated gift store, but all retail display space in a museum is valuable real estate. Wargo says that the Met’s targets for gross sales range from $50,000 for a “very tiny” exhibition, with just a stand of books, to more than $1 million for a blockbuster show, such as the van Gogh drawings in 2005. The profit from publications and reproductions for the 1997–98 “Treasures of Tutankhamun” amounted to more than $8 million, a sizable percentage of which was from the sale of 3-D merchandise across the U.S. It’s no wonder that the Met’s on-site retail operation has ballooned from a modest Information and Sales desk in 1910 to the present 12,500- square-foot main store plus bookstands and smaller shops scattered throughout the building.

Today, artists are often enlisted to design items for their museum shows. Calnek’s favorites from his time at the Guggenheim include the sweatshirts, stickers and motorcycle-jacket patches created by Matthew Barney for his “Cremaster Cycle” retrospective in 2003. “He had a whole studio to make costumes, logos and scenery for the films that were easily turned to merchandise,” Calnek recalls. “We let his studio loose on that.”

Cai Guo-Qiang specified that the T-shirts, scarves and tote bags accompanying his “I Want to Believe” show, which opened at the Guggenheim last February, have actual holes in the material to mimic the effect of the explosions used to produce his gunpowder drawings. He created a pattern that was burned into the fabric by hand using incense sticks, says Katherine Lock, a retail buyer at the museum.

Of course, there’s no telling how Lorenzo Ghiberti would have felt about seeing the angels in his Gates of Paradise gilded-bronze panels transformed into Christmas tree ornaments, or what Frida Kahlo, a stalwart Communist, would have thought about her self-portraits being reproduced not just on T- shirts but on coffee mugs and luggage tags. Today, however, many artists are more than amenable. Contemporary stars as diverse as Richard Prince and Kiki Smith have become masters at commodifying their output. Few, though, have gone as far as Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami, who have transformed themselves into must-have brands: the former with his planned London store Other Criteria, selling such items as T-shirts, postcards and a £25,000 gold charm bracelet, derived from his work, and the latter with a product line ranging from key chains and soccer balls to erotic videotapes and Paint Your Own Ms Ko2 model kits. “For Takashi, the ownership of this identity, of this imagery and iconography, is more important than the objects themselves,” says L.A. MoCA’s Schimmel.

Given such trends, it should come as no surprise that museums have become more ambitious in the ways they transform the imagery of masterpieces into merchandise. “There’s definitely a marketing component,” says Gail Harrity, the chief operating officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where sales of general merchandise account for 5 to 10 percent of the institution’s overall income. “There’s excitement around buying a catalogue or a memento like an apron that reminds people when they cook at home of their wonderful visit to the museum.” As in other areas of retail, how people transport their purchases presents a huge advertising opportunity. Says Gerstein: “We invest in very expensive shopping bags with a major image from the exhibition. People keep them and even bring them on planes.”

No longer, then, is art just for art’s sake—or for the sake of a few choice collectors, for that matter. From its modest roots in the museum shop, artist merchandise has exploded onto the art scene, to the pleasure of some and the dismay of others. The pleasure seems to have prevailed. This summer at the ©Murakami store in the Brooklyn Museum, one young man bought a Kaikai doll for his girlfriend, while a 30-something couple from Paris toting a giant, smiling pink-and-white flower cushion said they would have preferred the supersize version but couldn’t figure out how to get it home. The store clerk says the Murakami-designed shopping bags—essentially free souvenirs with a minimum purchase—were so popular that customers literally fought over them.

Also this summer, in the shop located beyond the fabulous couture dresses and costumes of the Met’s blockbuster “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” exhibition, two friends discussed the merits of stringy Spider Web Shawls, while teenage boys exchanged X-Men and Spidey factoids over pop-up books. Manning the register was Daniel Loor, who channeled Clark Kent by combing back his gelled dark hair, donning thick blackframed glasses and opening his white shirt at the chest to expose the Superman logo emblazoned on another shirt underneath. “This is by far the funnest shop I’ve ever worked in,” he said as he rang up sales among the giddy young crowd. "The Other Art Market" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2008 Table of Contents.