The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte.

---

The Guilty Pleasure

A confession about museum gift shops, and the twenty best ones in the world

Let us be honest about this. The museum gift shop is not supposed to be the point. You are there for the Vermeers, for the Rodins, for the collection of pre-Columbian goldwork that the placard describes as among the finest outside South America. You have bought the ticket and navigated the audio guide and stood in front of the things that matter for the appropriate amount of time. The gift shop is the exit, the decompression chamber, the place you pass through on the way to the coat check.

And then you are in it for forty-five minutes.

There is a specific pleasure that the museum gift shop provides and that no other retail environment quite replicates, and it has to do with the particular quality of curation that the best ones achieve. The museum gift shop at its finest is not a gift shop with museum branding applied to it. It is an extension of the museum’s curatorial intelligence into a different register — the same eye that selected the collection selecting the objects, books, prints, and curiosities that surround you now. A well-run museum gift shop makes you want to live differently. A badly run one sells tote bags with the logo on them, which is a different proposition entirely.

---

A note on what makes one good

The best museum gift shops share certain qualities. They sell things you cannot find elsewhere — objects commissioned specifically for the collection, editions produced in collaboration with artists, books published by the museum’s own press that are genuinely the definitive texts on their subjects. They are staffed by people who know what they are selling and why. They have a point of view: the gift shop of a design museum looks different from the gift shop of a natural history museum, and both look different from the gift shop of a contemporary art institution, because each is an expression of the collection’s intelligence applied to a different set of objects.

The worst museum gift shops are the ones that have decided that their audience wants novelty mugs and refrigerator magnets and scarves with Monet’s water lilies printed on them at a scale that reduces the painting to pattern. These exist in large numbers and are not on this list.

What is on this list is the twenty museum gift shops that this column would visit for their own sake — the ones that justify a detour, that have produced purchases that are still in use years later, that understand what a museum gift shop is for.

---

The twenty best museum gift shops in the world

1. MoMA Design Store, New York
The gold standard against which all other museum gift shops are measured, and not merely because MoMA’s collection gives it the deepest design intelligence to draw from. The MoMA Design Store — which operates both inside the museum and as a standalone store across the street on 53rd Street — has been collecting and selling objects that meet its design criteria since 1939, and the result is a retail environment whose stock is genuinely curated rather than licensed. Furniture, lighting, kitchenware, stationery, toys, jewellery: everything here has passed the same test that the museum’s acquisitions committee applies to the collection. The Eames house bird. The Marimekko textiles. The long wall of art books that constitutes one of the best art bookshops in New York in its own right.
http://www.moma.org/visit/stores

2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Met’s gift shops — there are several, distributed across the building’s considerable acreage — reflect the breadth of a collection that spans five thousand years of human civilisation, which means that the objects available range from Egyptian jewellery reproductions to contemporary artist editions to the publications of the Met’s own press, which are among the finest art books produced by any institution in the world. The basement shop near the Greek and Roman galleries has the best selection of small objects. The main shop near the Great Hall has the books. Allow time for both.
http://www.metmuseum.org/shop

3. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The V&A gift shop is the finest in London and one of the finest in Europe, which is exactly what you would expect from the world’s leading museum of art, design, and performance. The range is extraordinary — ceramics, textiles, wallpapers, jewellery, stationery, and an architecture and design book selection that is as good as any specialist bookshop in the city. The William Morris and Owen Jones pattern books, the reproduction tiles, the objects commissioned from contemporary designers who have been selected with the same intelligence that selected the collection: this is the gift shop as an argument about what design can be.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/shop

4. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
The Rijksmuseum gift shop benefits from one of the world’s great collections and from the Dutch tradition of applying design intelligence to everyday objects with a rigour that other cultures admire and rarely match. The Delftware reproductions — not the tourist-facing blue-and-white approximations sold everywhere in Amsterdam, but the precise, museum-quality editions produced in collaboration with the Royal Delft manufactory — are the reason to come. The Vermeer and Rembrandt print editions, carefully produced at scales that respect the originals, are the reason to stay.
http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/shop

5. Tate Modern, London
Tate Modern’s gift shop has the confidence of an institution that takes contemporary art seriously enough to commission objects from the artists it shows rather than simply licensing their images. The range of artist multiples — limited edition objects produced specifically for Tate by artists in the collection — is the best in the UK. The book selection, which covers contemporary art criticism, theory, and practice with unusual depth, is the most serious in any London museum. The children’s section is the best argument for raising children near an art museum.
http://www.tate.org.uk/shop

6. Centre Pompidou, Paris
The Pompidou gift shop occupies a space that feels like it was designed by the same people who designed the building, which is either a coincidence or a curatorial statement and probably both. The stock leans hard into the French tradition of design objects — furniture editions, lighting, ceramics, the kind of thing that sits on a shelf and starts a conversation about whether it is art or not, which is exactly the question the Pompidou exists to ask. The poster selection, produced to museum standards of reproduction quality, is the best in Paris. The bookshop component, strong on French-language theory and strong enough in English translation to be worth the journey from the anglophone world, is the best reason to go to the sixth floor.
http://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/visit/bookshop-and-gift-shop

7. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
Louisiana is one hour north of Copenhagen, in a white modernist building on a clifftop above the Øresund strait, with a sculpture garden that is as much the point as the collection inside. The gift shop is, correspondingly, one of the most beautifully situated retail environments in the world — and what it sells matches the setting. Danish design at its most specific: ceramics from the country’s finest studios, jewellery by Scandinavian artists, textiles, furniture editions, and the Louisiana-published catalogues that are among the most beautiful art books produced in Europe. The poster shop, which produces high-quality reproductions of exhibition posters going back decades, is the reason to bring an extra bag.
http://www.louisiana.dk/en/shop

8. Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute’s gift shop is the best in the American Midwest and one of the best in the country, with a particular strength in the areas where the collection is strongest: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, American decorative arts, and architectural drawing (the Burnham collection of architectural drawings is one of the great holdings in the world, and the shop’s architecture and design book section reflects this). The reproductions of the Thorne Miniature Rooms — scaled models of European and American interior design across six centuries, one of the collection’s most peculiar and beloved holdings — are available only here.
http://www.shop.artic.edu

9. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York
The Cooper Hewitt is the Smithsonian’s design museum, housed in the former Carnegie Mansion on Fifth Avenue, and its gift shop is the most focused on design as a functional practice of any museum shop in the world. The objects here are not souvenirs or reproductions; they are things that have been selected because they are well-designed. Kitchen tools, lighting, stationery, textiles, toys, furniture — all chosen by a curatorial team that applies the museum’s acquisition criteria to retail selection. The interactive pen, which allows visitors to collect objects from the collection digitally and then manipulate them in the museum’s interactive tables, is the most interesting piece of museum technology currently in use anywhere and is available for purchase at the shop.
http://www.cooperhewitt.org/visit/shop

10. SFMOMA, San Francisco
SFMOMA’s gift shop is the best on the West Coast, with a particularly strong selection of artist multiples, design objects, and the kind of art jewellery that occupies the territory between the gallery and the wearable. The museum’s architecture — the Mario Botta building expanded by Snøhetta in 2016 — informs the shop’s aesthetic, which tends toward the geometric and the material-specific. The book selection covers contemporary art and architecture with the depth that the Bay Area’s design culture demands.
http://www.sfmoma.org/museum-store

11. Musée d’Orsay, Paris
The Orsay gift shop has the advantage of a collection — Impressionism and Post-Impressionism at its fullest and finest — that produces the most commercially legible imagery in Western art history, and the intelligence to resist reducing that imagery to products. The textile reproductions, produced in collaboration with French manufacturers using the colour standards of the conservation team, are the finest fabric-based souvenirs available in any museum in the world. The publication programme, covering the Impressionist period with the seriousness of a university press, is second only to the Met’s for depth and quality.
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/shop

12. Design Museum, London
The Design Museum in Kensington — moved from its original Shad Thames home to the former Commonwealth Institute in 2016 — has a gift shop that is as good an argument for the museum’s existence as the exhibitions themselves. The objects are chosen by designers, not buyers: the question applied to every item is whether it demonstrates design intelligence, not whether it will sell. The answer, consistently, is both. The range covers product design, fashion, graphics, and architecture; the book section is the finest design-specific bookshop in London.
http://www.designmuseum.org/shop

13. Guggenheim Bilbao
The Guggenheim Bilbao gift shop has the Gehry building on its side — the titanium curves and the dramatic siting above the Nervión river produce a context that makes everything inside the building feel more significant than it might elsewhere, and the gift shop benefits from this. The Basque-specific design objects — ceramics, textiles, food products from the surrounding region — sit alongside the standard Guggenheim artist editions in a combination that is more specific to place than most museum gift shops manage. The Jeff Koons Puppy merchandise, which leans into the self-aware absurdity of the topiary sculpture outside, is the most knowing souvenir available in any museum on this list.
http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/visit/shop

14. National Gallery, London
The National Gallery gift shop is the finest place in London to buy a print, and prints are what it does best: the reproduction programme, developed with conservation-grade colour matching and printed on archival-quality paper, produces images of the collection that are significantly closer to the originals than any other institution manages at this price point. The print-on-demand service, which allows you to order any work from the collection in any size, is the most useful single offering in any museum gift shop in Britain.
http://www.shop.nationalgallery.org.uk

15. Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The Uffizi gift shop — recently expanded and redesigned as part of the broader renovation of the gallery under director Eike Schmidt — has become significantly more interesting in the past decade, moving away from the standard Botticelli-and-Leonardo merchandise toward a more considered selection of objects that engage with the Renaissance tradition rather than reproducing it. The facsimile editions of Leonardo’s notebooks, produced in partnership with Italian publishing houses that understand the technical requirements, are the finest reproductions available outside a specialist rare books dealer. The jewellery programme, designed in collaboration with Florentine goldsmiths using motifs from the collection, is worth the visit independently.
http://www.uffizi.it/en/the-uffizi/shop

16. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
The Stedelijk — Amsterdam’s museum of modern and contemporary art and design — has a gift shop that reflects the Dutch conviction that design is not a luxury but a birthright. The objects here are chosen with the same eye that assembled one of the finest collections of De Stijl and Dutch modernist design in the world. The Rietveld reproductions — small-scale editions of the furniture that Gerrit Rietveld designed and that the Stedelijk holds in depth — are available only here and are the most design-historically significant objects available in any museum gift shop in Europe.
http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/visit/museum-shop

17. Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
The Frank Gehry building in the Bois de Boulogne — the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s home since 2014 — has a gift shop that is, predictably, the most fashion-adjacent on this list: the LVMH connection means that the merchandise programme draws on resources that no other cultural institution can access, including artist collaborations, limited editions, and the kind of object whose design credibility is as high as its price point. The exhibition catalogues, produced with the full production budget of a luxury house applied to art publishing, are the most beautiful books available in any Paris museum shop.
http://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en/boutique

18. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The MFA Boston gift shop has a particular strength in Japanese art — reflecting the museum’s extraordinary collection of Japanese paintings, prints, and decorative arts, one of the finest outside Japan — and in American decorative arts, where the collection’s depth produces a book and object selection that is genuinely scholarly in its range. The textile reproductions, produced in collaboration with American manufacturers using conservation-grade colour standards, are the finest in North America. The kimono-inspired accessories, developed with Japanese craft workshops that supply the conservation department, are available nowhere else.
http://www.shop.mfa.org

19. Tokyo National Museum, Ueno
The Tokyo National Museum’s gift shop is the finest introduction to the Japanese tradition of applying craft intelligence to everyday objects available to the visitor who has not already spent years in Japan. The reproductions of objects from the collection — lacquerware, ceramics, metalwork, textiles — are produced in collaboration with the Living National Treasures of Japan, the designation given to craftspeople whose skills are considered part of the national cultural heritage, and the quality of the reproduction is correspondingly extraordinary. The furoshiki wrapping cloths, produced in traditional Japanese textiles with designs from the collection, are the most useful souvenir available in any museum in Asia.
http://www.tnm.jp/modules/r_free_page/index.php?id=157

20. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art online shop
Louisiana appears on this list twice because it deserves to — not for the same reasons as the physical shop but because the Louisiana online shop is the finest museum retail operation on the internet, and because the experience of buying from it (beautifully photographed objects, intelligent curatorial notes on each item, packaging that arrives as though the museum itself had wrapped it) is the closest thing available to the gift shop experience for anyone who cannot get to the clifftop above the Øresund on a given day. The poster editions, the ceramics, the jewellery, the catalogues: all of it available online, all of it shipped to wherever you are, all of it worth the weight in the bag going home.
http://www.shop.louisiana.dk

---

The Passenger publishes every Friday.

— Bergotte