Page 81 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

Museums

72 Museums are involved in hybrid consumption in three contrasting and interesting
ways. First and most obviously, they are increasingly tuned to providing shopping
and restaurant opportunities for visitors. These are invariably a major source of
income and have moved far beyond the small shop you pass through as you exit
the museum or the tiny restaurant serving a limited range of drinks and food.
Nowadays, especially in the larger museums, shopping and eating are major com-
ponents of revenue and are catered for with often more than one shop and restau-
rant. 46 For major museums, retailing has become a major activity and can
contribute as much as a quarter of its earned income. For the Museum of Modern
Art store in New York has sales of $1,750 per square foot which compares with
$250 for the average US mall and $600 for the Mall of America. 47
Second, museums are sometimes part of general hybrid consumption settings.
Large sports clubs often include a museum or at least some museum displays as part
of the range of consumption forms that they offer. Previously, it was noted that MCI
Center in Washington, DC, includes some museum displays and in many stadiums
there are full-blown museums. Spanish football clubs Barcelona and Real Madrid
both have large museums, as does Manchester United at its Theatre of Dreams, Old
Trafford. Universal CityWalk in Universal City includes a Museum of Neon Art
among its themed restaurants and shops. 48 Some companies, such as Hershey,
Crayola, Goodyear, and Hormel Foods (Spamtown), in the US and Cadbury in
England, have added museums to the attractions that have been created around their
manufacturing plants. 49 For a short time, there was a Coca-Cola museum in the
Showcase Mall in Las Vegas, but it closed down due to lack of interest.
Third, what is and is not a museum is becoming increasingly difficult to deter-
mine. As Macdonald observes, ‘the boundaries between museums and other insti-
tutions have become elided’. 50 In part, this is because museums have taken on
many aspects and characteristics of a theme park that is consequent on their
theming (see Chapter 2). Another factor is the emergence of what Urry has termed
‘a postmodern museum culture in which almost anything can become an object
of curiosity’. 51 However, even more than this, museum-like exhibits sometimes
permeate non-museum environments. In the Past Times chain of shops in Britain,
simulated artefacts of the past are for sale in museum-like surroundings. Nowhere
is this trend more apparent than at Niketown Chicago. As noted in Chapter 2, the
store was designed to have the features of a museum, such as memorabilia in
boxed glass cases, as well as those of a store. The museum mode of exhibiting
memorabilia caused considerable confusion on the part of shoppers who were
concerned about whether they could purchase anything and whether they should
pay an entrance fee. However, the museum atmosphere was generally well
received by visitors. Drawing on her ethnographic study of the Chicago store,
Peñaloza quotes one visitor (a white male in his 30s) as saying, while gesturing to