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Souvenirs and the Museum Store: Icons of Culture and Status to Go [Page 2] The space of the museum and the connotations of the institution orient and reduce the objects inside and subsequently, cultures contained and represented by it. Roger Silverstone describes this as; “[Museums] offer an ideologically inflected account of the world” (162). Further, the museum’s position is increasingly nebulous and compromised in terms of what and how it represents. The museum is no longer, if it ever was, an institution which can be understood on its own terms as innocently engaged in the processes of the collection, conservation, classification and display of objects. On the contrary, it is one among many components in a complex array of culture and leisure industries isolated from political and economic pressures or from the explosion of images and meanings which are, arguably, transforming our relationships in contemporary society to time, space and reality. (Ibid. 161) Like objects in the museum, souvenirs are positioned in a particular way in the museum store. Souvenirs speak a version of the realities of the objects and exhibits displayed in the space of the institution. The meaning of a souvenir is limited however, by its very nature. Souvenirs, because they are produced for purely commercial consumptive purposes, are robbed of any context or history. The souvenir object in the museum store is far more transient than the display object in the museum both in terms of physical location and assigned meanings, as souvenirs perform different functions for different people and museums are the souvenir objects’ point of departure, not their home. Regardless of status as a commercial souvenir or preserved artifact, An object is nothing unless it is part of a collection. A collection is nothing unless it can successfully lay claim to a logic of classification which removes it from the arbitrary or the occasional. In its work of collection, the museum provides both a model for, and an echo of the work of consumption in which we all engage, extracting from the world of use or commercial values objects which, in our appropriation of them, gain their meaning by their inclusion in our own symbolic universe. (Silverstone 165) The practice of collection then, is a way of formulating meaning for the institution or the individual, depending on the context and scale. Souvenir purchase, as an act of collecting, works for the individual. Baudrillard asserts in The System of Objects that for children, collecting is a way of ordering and mastering the world (87). The continuous acquisition of souvenirs is the adult equivalent, the goods operating as badges of cultural legitimacy and knowledge. The nature of collecting, when related to the topic of museums and souvenirs, presents an interesting dilemma. Museums house collections of objects; museum stores house collections of commodities inspired or derived from those objects, and visitors, in purchasing from the museum store, are collecting a version of the museum’s constructed and presented reality. By their presence in the museum space, the displayed objects are legitimized as being worthy of classification and maintenance. By their inclusion in the museum store, souvenir objects are pronounced worthy and representative of certain exhibits and collections as a whole. Removed from any named or recognizable origin, the museum store souvenir, like the modern collected work of art, is highly paradoxical. Insofar as the modern collector takes objects out of their original context and invests them with an abstract, transcendental value, he can be described as a fetishist of the object. And yet, by ignoring the object’s original purpose and use, the art collector’s appropriation of a work of art because of its aesthetic and spiritual values strips it of any ‘commodity value’ it may have had. In other words, according to Benjamin, the collector replaces the commodity fetish with a cultural fetish. (Anemone 253) What then, can be made of these objects created solely as souvenirs, stereotyped encapsulations of culture, tourist items bereft of meaning or value? Souvenirs must be looked at as fetishes of experience. In their creation as commemorations of experience, souvenirs are set further apart from artifacts. Museum objects were not produced or intended for display in the museum. In fact, their arrival and eventual residence in the museum space is relatively serendipitous. While they may have been ‘produced’ in a way for presentation by the way they are selected and organized in conjunction with other objects, they have a history of their own. They were all as timeless as that moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever just occurring, these ornaments, utensils and mementos stranded in [the museum], objects that for reasons one could never know had outlived their former owners and survived the process of destruction. (Sebald 197) Souvenir objects, in contrast, have no such uniqueness or proof of value evidenced by their origin and function or lack thereof. They are produced only to be bought; they are not purposely preserved objects. The poet, Martin Espada, describes this sense of non-worth in an interview. “[There is] in general no sense of history beyond ‘souvenir history,’ the kind of history that is commemorated every Fourth of July. A very superficial understanding of history” (Ratiner 1). Souvenirs derive their meaning from artificial constructions with no basis on actual context. Ceremony of presentation becomes more important than meaning. What is paramount is each souvenir’s attractiveness to the consuming visitor as a commodity, not its accuracy in cultural representation. Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Works Cited Writing Index | Writing on Film

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