Art Museum Gift Shop

Where the hoarders go to forget about what they really desire

Then there are the people who go to the art museum gift shop first.

Before they even look at the art.

These people are incredible.

They buy coffee mugs with the masterpieces on them before they even look at the masterpieces. Imagining a morning when they can sip coffee and remember the feeling of buying a coffee mug in the art museum gift shop.

They buy pot holders with a Native American Matriarch Bear on them.

Who buys pot holders at the art museum? Crate and Barrel not good enough for you? Or does the Native American Matriarch Bear say something special about your approach to hot items on the stove?  

I saw one lady, she bought a zip pouch with a Van Gogh on it.

What’s a zip pouch, you ask? Nobody knows. The kind of bag you buy that’s useful for exactly nothing. The kind of bag you buy so that you can put it out with the other garage sale items in five years. “I picked this up years ago at an art museum gift shop. In Cleveland, maybe? Anyway, that’s a Van Gogh. Remember that song, ‘Starry Starry Night?’ Two dollars.”

Over here, they sell Japanese Plum Soap in a wrapping that looks like a Japanese floral print.

So that two weeks later, it can dawn on you in the shower that when you visited the art museum, you forgot to look for the section on Japanese art.

Meanwhile, upstairs, the masterpieces on the walls just hang there. Dead.

When their shift ends, our friends the security guards wander in and pretend they’re still on duty while they glower at the shoppers.

They know that sales from the gift shop help pay their salary. But they can hardly contain their loathing for the clientele. “Hoarders of beauty,” they call them.

“They hoard all the beauty so they don’t have to feel summoned by it. It’s hard to feel summoned when the beauty is simply the design on your lower lumbar pillow.”  

Behind the t-shirt rack, the security guards concoct a cunning plan.

“We’ll print our own messages on coffee mugs and pot holders and zip pouches. Then sneak the items onto the shelves. Then the unsuspecting hoarders will buy them and take them home.”

“How about a zip pouch with this baby on it…”

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself, they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.  

C.S. Lewis

“You know? It would work even better on a coffee mug. So that when the hoarders are still half awake, sipping their first cup of coffee—”

“They’ll be convicted for the idol worshippers they are.”

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In my novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, Benedict Aquila riffs on the theme of beauty in a way that would make the art museum security guards nod their heads with understanding:

“One Sunday morning in the upper bunk at school, I had rolled over, slept another hour, too bored by the thought of Mass to be bothered. Thus, easily and dully, I launched my revolution with the snooze button. Then, after one mindless act of rebellion, the sluice gate opened and others followed. Yet I did not cease from worship. What did Chesterton say? When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing; he believes in anything. In my adolescent years, I believed in the oblivion of drugs and alcohol, and, as you see, it remained for me a minor deity. But most of all I believed in Beauty. On a trip to Berlin as a boy, at the Neues Museum, I was given a premonition of my vocation. I was brought to see the bust of Nefertiti, and I remembered the catch in my breath as I stood before it marveling at the towering neck, the smooth café au lait skin, the high cheekbones and full lips, the complacency of the teardrop eyes outlined in black, the regal elegance of her tall headgear. I remembered my heart breaking with an intoxicating sadness as I gaped at her. From that moment I was, like one of the Egyptian queen’s retainers, enslaved to that sadness. I gave it service everywhere: when at Cambridge I first delighted in the Italian of Dante; when in Rome I first looked up into the oculus of the Pantheon and wondered how the weight of the dome was distributed; and when in San Francisco I wandered the streets on that white Dickensian night. And I gave it service on the day when I first saw Veronica Arden, soon to be Veronica Cody. Michael had brought me to see her play Cleopatra in a student production at RADA, and when she came on stage, it was as though, except for Veronica’s fairer skin, the bust of Nefertiti had come to life. The same sadness was in her eyes too. I had seen it long before I ever learned she was ill. Sometimes, I would stare furtively at her and, before she turned and caught me, I would see in those gray eyes a desperate look that seemed to say, ‘Will this exile never end, or must I wander in this desert forever?’

“We were all Catholic once. Me, Michael, Veronica, Kate. Even Adele, one morning in her infancy, was carried into a Roman church and with the water and the oil marked forever as a child of God. But we had all of us abandoned that religion. Why? Not that any of us worked out the reasons beforehand. But why? For me, I guess I had come to believe, or to assume, that all of that had been demolished by science, rendered mythical, silly, even dangerous. The heavens had been emptied. As delightful as it sounded in poetry, love did not move the sun and the other stars. It was only gravity.

“Yet our freedom left us sad and lonely, burdened by the weight of what we had given up. We became adult human creatures careening through life like toddlers knocking things down, with no one to come along and clean up the mess. For my part, I could not stay away from you, Beauty, though I knew you could never satisfy me. You were even worse than drugs and alcohol because you tricked me with the promise of so much more.

‘Follow me. I can give you all the joy you’re looking for.’

“And I followed you, just like the sluts I would sometimes pick up on the streets of Rome and Paris and London, only to wake up not with the promised joy but with the same yawning maw of sadness.”

The Good Death of Kate Montclair is available on Amazon and at Chrism Press.

Image of the art museum gift shop courtesy of Alexandra Birenbaum at Wikimedia Commons.