The Cultural Experience of Gift Shops

‘The thing is, if people can have a leaflet and take something away with them for free, they won’t buy an exhibition guide.’
— RITA APSAN, manager of the Freud Museum Shop

The museum gift shop can be considered to have two key roles: dissemination of the ideas that arise in the museum itself, often with a wider and remote audience; and to generate revenue to support the functioning, staffing and future contribution of the museum. It is easy to be over critical of these retail outlets — there is something jarring about the juxtaposition of such an obviously commercial experience with one of cultural importance — but clearly there is a symbiotic relationship between the two.

In terms of the remote learning potential of the gift shop — the relationship between the museum and the sales of products such as books, DVDs and postcards seems relatively straightforward. Through these, ideas can circulate via textual, cinematographic and photographic means, generating discussions and encouraging thinking. The Freud Museum, whilst not carrying a range of books directly covering the academic side of psychoanalysis, does carry a selection of introductory books on the topics for the casual reader as well as a range of broader topics — including cinema, feminism and fashion. At this point, however, the museum shop’s main role as retailer and revenue generator becomes clear. Despite the Freud Museum’s shop providing around a quarter of all the income for the museum (through a combination of sales, private events and book launches), the best selling items are gifts and non-book items. It is worth noting here that although museums are places of learning for some — to others they may only be stops on a tour of a city or country, and these two types of visitor have very different requirements of the gift shop. Although the purest form of a museum shop might well be as academic nurturer, in reality, the majority of the customer base is looking for a very different experience — that of a souvenir retailer. Souvenir comes from the French, (se) souvenir — to remember, which in turn comes from the Latin subvenire — to come up, come to mind, and is defined as ‘something that is kept as a reminder of a place you have visited, an event you have been to, etc.’ Although traditionally, souvenirs were found objects rather than bought (as explored in the Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios exhibition at the Smithsonian), an entire industry has formed around commercial souvenirs for tourists. Tourist destinations evoke the idea of crossing places off a list — and in this sense a bought souvenir become objectified ticks on a checklist.

The representation of oneself through objects is nothing new in connection to Freud — he himself was an avid collector of antiquities. It was Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who was among the first to explore the role of objects and their emotive power over people — in Propaganda he noted: ‘A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see it as a symbol of something else…’. In this sense, objects from museums become status symbols, totems to prove participation with (and consumption of) culture. The idea of an object having the power to define a person — ‘this product expresses me’ — is well known, but what about ‘this product expresses my experience’? One of Freud’s detractors, Herbert Marcuse, argued that Freud had conjured up a world where people could only express their feelings through mass produced objects, creating ‘one-dimensional man’. Has this now gone one step further, whereby people can only express their memories through said mass produced objects, creating ‘one-dimensional experiences’?

For non-educational products such as souvenirs, kitsch is a key element — especially when the relationship between product and the topic covered by the museum seems strenuous or flippant. It is easy to condemn such products and question their worth in such a setting — do a pair of Freudian Slippers devalue Freud’s work in the field of psychoanalysis? Similarly, does a plush Einstein toy cheapen the general theory of relativity? In reality, the answer is: probably not. What this use of humour does do, however, is create a platform for engagement with a wider audience, especially when dealing with topics as dense and seemingly impenetrable to the casual visitor as psychoanalysis or quantum mechanics. In fact, for Rita Apsan (manager of the Freud Museum shop), humour is a key influence when deciding what products make it into the Freud Museum shop’s range. She recounts, ‘…when I started I remember there were psychoanalysts who would see a pair of Freudian Slippers and say, “How dare you do that? How dare you sell these things?” But I thought it was funny, and people buy them because they’re funny.’ Surely this is a crucial factor — in a free market economy, products that don’t sell stop being produced. Although these items might be considered to be offensive to some people, they create connections and provide a route in to a complex topic for a mass audience. In response to the negative connotations of kitsch, in All in the Best Possible Taste, Grayson Perry argues, ‘A lot of people dismiss kitsch as mass produced tat, and someone once described it as art who’s soul has departed. But I think that when you hear [a person] talking about the knick-knacks and ornaments in [their] house, there is a lot of soul in them.’ Similarly, in For Culture’s Sake, Constantine Boym argues that the tension arises through this discourse between owner and object: ‘The object works metonymically, as a part or a fragment that evokes larger places and events. Its partialness, however, is always supplemented by a personal narrative or recollection. The popular appeal of souvenirs is rooted precisely in this combination of material object and immaterial, fleeting sentiment.’ Clearly kitsch plays an important role in the museum gift shop, as it allows for visitors of all demographic backgrounds to partake in the experience of the museum, and to recount this experience with other people.

While narrative with the object plays a key role here, the authenticity of the product also comes into question. Does a mass produced Egyptian cat statue, that can also be bought from the British Museum shop, have less inherent worth than a bespoke artist’s piece that can only be bought from the Freud Museum? And as such, does a mass produced object become less valuable as a reminder of past memories or expression of cultural participation just because the object itself is commoditized — it can be purchased elsewhere by other people, their own experiences and memories projected onto it. The Freud Museum shop even allows visitors to take away an artist’s representation of a Sphinx that is based directly on a Greek terracotta piece from the late 5th / early 4th Century BC, housed in the archive. This new souvenir goes on to weave a complex web of relationships and narratives between the original owner, original object, artist, new object, and tourist.

Buying from a museum gift shop legitimises the act of consumption in a capitalist society, as there is an implied sense of learning and engagement with culture attached to the items. Many people feel uncomfortable about the idea of consumption as a method of self-expression, but by buying non-essential items from a museum, the object is now justified as something of worth because of its cultural significance — whether the customer made it past the gift shop or not. The most extreme example of the museum gift shop is one that becomes hypermarket-esque, indiscriminately providing visitors with every commercial product they could possible need on the museum’s subject — the Natural History Museum and Science Museum both being potent examples of this. In both these institutes, a combination of architecture and wayfinding means that a visit to the museum ends (unavoidably) in a trip to the gift shop, reminiscent of the way that supermarkets pre-determine your journey through the grocery aisles. In some cases, it is easier to visit the shop than the exhibitions they promote. The boundary between shop and museum becomes blurred — the shop becomes an exhibition in its own right, with the museum taking on the role of elaborate window dressing. A trip to the museum without seeing the shop becomes unthinkable. At this point, the gift shop becomes the museum’s flagship store — the cultural equivalent of NikeTown or Disneyland. If the museum is considered as a brand in it’s own right, rather than as a cultural institution, the power the gift shop has over visitors becomes patently obvious. Clearly there is nothing spectacular about a simple pencil, nor is there any distinguishable difference between one from the Freud Museum or Charles Dickens’ House or even the V&A. These items sell, however, because of the establishment they represent, the emblem they bear, and the cultural experience they signify. Much in the same way that people wear branded clothes to unite (or differentiate) themselves with others, logo adorned stationery, homeware and curios recount cultural experiences with the outside world — expressing the person and their interests through the objects they have collected. It is clear too that buying from gift shops is a highly experiential activity — as pointed out by Apsan when she mentions that the Freud Museum struggles to generate revenue via online sales. Buying from a museum shop is a way of documenting an experience of the place, and to do this from behind a computer screen without visiting the museum renders the products useless — silencing the narrative they provoke with the possessor. When the products in question are mass produced, there is no longer a reason to buy directly from the museum when there are multiple online retailers competing on price — the discourse that creates a niche advantage is rendered void.

In some ways, this narrative means that the mass production of souvenirs and mementos is irrelevant. Rather than being defined by a single object, a person can translate their experiences through a carefully curated selection of objects, each with their own narratives which work together to give a broader picture of a persons cultural activities, their interests and how they experienced these institutions. Boym suggests that culture is now the boundary that unites or divides groups of people, and a collection of souvenirs act as a personal Grand Tour, an exhibition of the Self that converses these experiences with the wider world. Perry also alludes to this when discussing the objects in someone’s home: ‘…it proved she wasn’t just shopping, it was more like curating. By alighting on things, she was bestowing her individuality on them.’ Perhaps then, the real purpose of the museum gift shop is not as a disseminator of knowledge or as a retail superstore. Perhaps it is to act as a facilitator, providing visitors with objects that will become social tools, vehicles to communicate their own experiences of culture with others. By collecting these museum-bought representations of themselves, visitors become curators of their own personal exhibitions — exhibitions that encourage dialogue with friends, family and peers, and go on to reach more people than either the museum or shop could ever alone.