Alternative museums in New York gone too far
US - America’s first pizzeria opened at 32 Spring Street in New York City in 1905. It was founded by Italian pizza maker Gennaro Lombardi, who sold each slice for five cents. The Museum of Pizza, opening this fall in New York, may or may not acknowledge this piece of history, and there’s a reason why.
It’s a selfie museum. Rather than hanging photos on a wall and outlining the chronological history of pizza, it’s a tourist-aiming pop-up space fit for a digital-savvy generation, featuring a pizza beach, a pizza cave and several funhouse spots to pose and celebrate pizza. Call it the Kusama effect. Since Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room exhibition has taken off ,it has fueled a debate around selfie-friendly art. Although Kusama’s artworks were not necessarily made for the smartphone, it’s still part of the “made-for-Instagram” exhibits, or “selfie factories”. The Museum of Pizza is not alone in its selfie-driven takeover. On 16 June, a new pop-up devoted to avocados opens in San Diego and the Museum of Candy opens this summer in New York, boasting a 15-room exhibition, a life-sized unicorn made of candy and “”. It was partly propelled by the Museum of Ice Cream, which launched in New York in 2016 and tapped into a serious demand. They sold more than 300,000 tickets priced at $18 in the first five days of its opening in 2016, resulting in a $5.4m haul. It has since traveled to Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco, where they almost doubled their ticket price to $38, and sold out six months’ worth of tickets in less than two hours. Meanwhile the “real museums” are struggling to pay the bills. The Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield is auctioning off 13 artworks, including classics by American painter Norman Rockwell, to meet their $55m debt. La Salle University in Philadelphia , which will go towards funding new teaching initiatives.
Artnet critic Ben Davis has warned that the new pop-up museums are contrived to feed our vanity. “It is an attraction that quite literally aspires to be the visual equivalent of junk food,” . “It is a very, very serious force to be reckoned with, rivaling the popularity of actual museums in any city it lands in.” While going to museums is supposed to be fun as well as educational are pop-up, photo-op museums the new Disneyland of the art world? “We see an opportunity to add new layers of playfulness to the current art, food and learning experience,” said Kareem Rahma, founder of the Museum of Pizza. “We love how the experiential aspects of a children’s science museum and the zany fun quality of Pee Wee’s Playhouse makes learning fun.”
(The Guardian)