Art   Drawings   Paintings   Paper Designs   Photography Books   Recommended   Writing-related Travel   Fiji   Grand Canyon Writing   Writing on Culture   Writing on Film   Writing on Travel   Poetry   Short Stories   Memoirs About Search

Souvenirs and the Museum Store: Icons of Culture and Status to Go People have long been collectors and travelers. Both roles have been and continue to be modes in which humans make sense of the world. Travel and collecting have come together in an often problematic and sometimes troubling tangible manifestation known as souvenirs. These hybridized and profoundly diverse goods appear everywhere, yet their reasons for production are always identical. As commercial objects, souvenirs function as commodities intended to bring the producer profit. Even in the space of the museum, the souvenir is present; yet here, given certain socio-cultural connotations associated with the institution, the souvenir’s presence in the museum store takes on new meanings. By addressing and investigating the cultural phenomenon of the museum store, I hope to uncover something about the nature of commercial intrusion into the arena of education, culture and history. Additionally, I will review the motives and meanings behind souvenirs in this context and how museums use the inventory and organization of commercial space within the institution to represent itself and the works and artifacts contained by it as an aid in marketing exhibits and trinkets alike. Museums, at the most basic level, provide homes for objects. The range is vast, yet each object is linked by a conscious decision made on its behalf to be preserved and displayed—rescued from obscurity and otherwise certain death by obsolescence. Indeed, the very livelihood of objects and museums requires their coexistence. Roger Silverstone best expresses this interdependence in his essay, The Medium is the Museum. Perhaps the single most obvious and most determining characteristic of the museum is the necessary presence within it of objects: of objects that have been controlled, conserved, classified and displayed, of objects that have, by their presence in the museum, to claim a particular status—unique, significant, representative. (162,3) Objects’ status is revealed and supported by display and their organization, in turn, produces their meanings according to position and relation to other objects. The museum artifact’s meaning becomes fixed, in that the preserved object has reached its final resting-place (Ibid. 163). Museums, as educational institutions of culture and history, designate and exercise a kind of authority in the sense of self-contained aura as well as through the objects housed by them. Conversely, souvenirs are placed on no such pedestal. The OED defines souvenir as the following: “a remembrance, a memory, a slight trace of something. A token of remembrance (usually a small article of some value bestowed as a gift) that reminds one of a person, place or event” (2934). Souvenirs, in the first instance, simplify and distort culture by reducing it to a few objects, mere “slight traces” of what they are representing. The process of likening anything to any other thing is to subvert its identity, because in describing a thing, one must relate it to something it is not. However, museum souvenirs strive to do more, to depict a culture via a few icons easy to recognize out of context. Souvenirs are an attempt to substitute objects for culture. For the souvenir collector, no culture exists until it is represented by objects. Representation is a presentation of a specific view of reality and the presenter responsible for that creation overdetermines every aspect of it with his or her own socio-cultural-historical bias. The act of representation is a highly feminizing process that imposes identity and meaning on particular entities. With souvenirs, representations are shaped to fit the consuming tourist’s gaze, although that gaze, in turn, shapes the representation. The gaze is a perspective constructed by social codes and mores designated from birth and by one’s cultural system. Foucault says these codes that govern our perceptions are invisible to those within the cultures they underlie. The visitor in the museum store, like the tourist, “is a consumer away from home” (Judd and Fainstein 14). “Satisfaction for the visitor and profit for the investor require that places [and cultures, in the case of museums] become transformed into objects” (ibid.). Jean Baudrillard offers further support for this claim in his book, The System of Objects, “Every object transforms something” (4). The souvenir solidifies and materializes the experience of the visit. Returning home without a memento threatens the memory of experience. A growing trend in museum visitation patterns documented by theorists and from personal observation is the habit of visitors to attend a museum for one specific exhibit. This practice seems to hierarchisize the importance of exhibits and objects within any given museum. The experience is no longer about totality or exposure to a wide range of concepts and modes, but rather is selectively dictated by subjectivity and personal preference and by the organization of the specific exhibit. The visitor self-selects his education and the volume of his receptive sphere of culture. Through the powerful vehicle of ‘event marketing’ museums are promoted as institutions and seek to draw visitors from all areas that might not typically visit the museum or even the city where the museum is located. The promotion of a single ‘star exhibit’ acts as a magnet, selling the institution as a whole. In turn, the museum store often features souvenirs based on that given exhibit to immortalize and summarize the experience for the visitor. In this vein, the museum store has become a destination within and of itself. Instead of the often monolithic and overtly didactic and somewhat threatening impression given by the museum itself, the commercial space of the store offers a kind of refuge for the less savvy or aggressive museum-goer. The store and the practices and expected behavioral norms of shopping that occur within in it are familiar to the average visitor and consumer and there seems to be significantly less of a climate of regulation and surveillance. Merchandise in the store presents the contents of the museum, but in a manner that is accessible. One may not take the unique exhibit home with them, but there is the option of taking ownership of the mass-produced copy. As souvenirs, cultural objects are simplified and diluted for the purposes of easy and ready consumption by a trusting mass audience. What function the museum store serves appears all fine and good on the surface, yet with closer inspection, revelations much less benign begin to emerge. Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Works Cited Writing Index | Writing on Film

Home | About | Guestbook | Help Support the Site | Contact | Copyright & Use