The last room in the museum

Researchers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art once stood near six of its masterpieces with stopwatches. The average visitor gave each painting 27 seconds; the median was 17. Sixteen years later the same team tried again at the Art Institute of Chicago and got almost the same result, except that a lot of people now spent some of their seconds on a selfie.

Nobody has run the equivalent study in the gift shop, which is a shame, because it would make for a much better headline. Most of us have spent longer choosing between two tote bags than we spent with anything upstairs.

The standard explanation for museum shopping is the souvenir: you liked the painting, so you buy the postcard. Fair enough. But that doesn't cover the grey Champion hoodie with MoMA spelled across the front in varsity letters, which sells to people who likely couldn't name a work in the building. That hoodie is the more interesting object.

Selling things to museum visitors is nearly as old as museums themselves. In 1802 Charles Willson Peale's museum in Philadelphia offered silhouette portraits for eight cents, cut on the spot by Moses Williams, an artist Peale had once enslaved. By one account around four in five visitors bought one. Seventy years later the Met commissioned etchings of Old Masters it had just acquired and hung them next to the originals, which is about as direct as a sales pitch gets.

The modern shop is mostly a product of the 1980s, of shopping as a weekend activity, touring blockbusters like Tutankhamun, and less public money. For most museums it is still a sideline. A 2003 survey put it at around 2 percent of a typical museum's operating revenue, and after the 2008 crash the Met shut 15 of its 23 satellite stores. MoMA is the exception, and the reason starts with what it collects.

MoMA was early to treat everyday design as art, so selling it came naturally. The Design Store opened across West 53rd Street in 1989, curators sign off on what goes on the shelves, and it was where Muji and HAY first found American customers.

For years the store sold other people's design. That changed with the 2017 show Items: Is Fashion Modern?, which put a 1980s Champion hoodie and the original Nike Air Force 1 in the galleries. The shop made its own hoodie and cap for the exhibition, and its buyer says they never stopped selling. By 2019 there were Champion hoodies with MoMA across the chest, at $80.

Nike has been back several times. In 2018 the store sold Virgil Abloh's Off-White Air Force 1 alongside a MoMA-branded basketball sock. In 2024 came an everyday sock stocked only in MoMA's US shops, and an Air Jordan 3 with clothing by Nina Chanel Abney, whose work the museum owns. Uniqlo, meanwhile, has paid for MoMA's free Friday nights since 2013 and puts the collection, and the logo, on T-shirts in its stores around the world.

Other museums have caught on. Kith did 51 pieces with the American Museum of Natural History, and the Met has done bags with Sprayground and clothes with Pacsun.

The money explains the enthusiasm. MoMA says its shops handle over 3 million transactions a year, while the galleries had around 2.7 million visitors in 2023 to 2024. Its 2024 accounts show roughly $83 million from retail, publishing and restaurants combined, against about $56 million from tickets and membership. Jesse Goldstine, who runs retail, now talks about the shops as a way into the museum rather than the way out.

The hoodie's lettering is borrowed from college sportswear, and so is the idea behind it. A university sweatshirt tells people where you studied. A MoMA one tells them where your taste went to school.

Academics have looked at the cheap end of this. A 2020 study of tote bags at literary festivals in Australia, Britain and the US found that bags from bookshops, magazines and museums were picked to show off what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital, meaning education and taste doing the job that money does elsewhere. Fashion writers had already noticed that the free canvas tote had become a status object.

Price is part of it. You can't buy anything in MoMA's collection, but you can buy its name for $80, and it doesn't come across as showing off the way a big designer logo does. It comes across as being interested in things and culturally educated, which for a certain kind of person is worth a lot more than looking well-off.

The Nike pieces work a second angle. A sock sold in a couple of stores in limited numbers is a drop, and wearing it says you follow both art and sneakers. The Van Gogh Museum plays the same game with Vans and A Bathing Ape. Nobody buying those is thinking much about brushwork. They're buying the story of the outsider ignored in his lifetime and proved right later, which streetwear has been selling to teenagers for decades.

These signals wear out, though. When Uniqlo sells MoMA T-shirts in malls worldwide, the logo means less, and it starts heading the way of the Joy Division shirt, worn by people who couldn't tell you what's on it. Among people who care about this stuff, the more prized tote is usually from somewhere small and hard to get to.

The Van Gogh Museum has gone furthest. It licenses the paintings to Vans, A Bathing Ape, Daily Paper, POP MART, LEGO and Pokémon, and its managing director said during the pandemic that licensing held up far better than the rest of the business, since nobody needs the museum to be open to buy a pair of trainers. Trade press puts museum retail and licensing at somewhere between $4.2 and $6.2 billion a year worldwide.

The Rijksmuseum went the other way. Since 2012 it has let anyone download high-resolution images of its collection, now over 700,000 works, and use them for anything, including commercially. Taco Dibbits, then its director of collections, said the collection is "in a way, everyone's property". You could print the Milkmaid on a hoodie tonight without asking. What you can't print is the museum's name, and that's most of what a museum shop is selling.

Museums put a lot of effort into telling you what matters and then not letting you touch it. The shop is where they relent. But the hoodie suggests people aren't mainly there to take home a bit of a painting. They want the museum's judgement, and they want to wear it to work.

Critics of museum commerce see that as the institution selling out. I'm not convinced. Deciding what's worth caring about is the museum's whole job, and an $80 hoodie is that job turned into something you can put on.