The best museum shops across the Spyplane Universe

Vibey slapper troves, IRL and online

Museum gift shops — are they crass and charmless abominations against culture, designed to sell overpriced trinkets masquerading as “rarefied objets” to philistines, dilettantes, tourists and status-anxious dorks??

This was the brutally spicy assessment bred into me (Jonah) at a formatively young age by my opinionated father, Papa Spyplane himself. Yes — much the same way I clearly remember Papa S. teaching me how to ride a bike, I clearly remember him teaching me to disdain gift shops: We were visiting the Met, when I saw a bunch of people perusing the, like, Water Lilies mousepads and Met-logo coffee mugs lining the gift shop. I suggested we see what all the fuss was about, to which he responded (I’m paraphrasing) “Hell no, son.” Gift shops, I was to learn, were places where a museum’s putatively high-culture pretensions went to die an embarrassing death, drowned in a rank cauldron of swagless consumerism… These shops, he explained, preyed on chumps, and it was his fatherly duty to instill and nurture an anti-chump-detector in me…

My mother, who is French, put it even more simply: “C’est nul.”

My parents were not alone in their disdain, of course. For a while theirs was the standard Based position on gift shops, shared not only by “renegade truth-tellers” like Banksy (Exit Through the Gift Shop), but also in more rarefied and respectable corners of the artworld… I’m assuming there’s mad stray lines about how gift shops are cheesy / pernicious in, like, ‘80s-era issues of October, and that there are dozens if not hundreds of institutional-critique pieces on the subject of how gift shops are torched beyond belief…

But, as I suspect is true with most people circa 2024, my current position on gift shops is… more flexible. I believe that Papa Spyplane is, on a fundamental level, correct. At their worst, museum shops, especially the ones at large institutions, are lame and grody, and when I hit them up I tend to feel like I’m engaging in some irreducible degree of bourgeois “mark behavior.” This was true in the past and it remains true today. Last year Erin and I saw the excellent Henry Taylor show at L.A. MOCA, and checking the gift shop afterwards we shuddered at the extremely wack merch on display: bad coffee mugs, corny “streetwear”-looking hoodies, and $2,000 limited-edition skate decks decorated with Taylor’s paintings … which reflect a particularly dispiriting trend of museums “pandering to moneyed swagless 35-year-olds,” as we wrote at the time.

That’s even worse than the JOYLESS contemporary technique of simply printing a museum’s name on a water bottle and calling it a day — no thank you!!

Now, maybe some of today’s gift-shop junk will come to look unexpectedly cool on eBay in a few decades, much the way, e.g., ‘90s-era screenprinted Rodin Museum tees that originally read as déclassé tourist trash started to look pretty tight within the past several years. But I’m doubtful.

And yet! Even my dad allowed some exceptions to his rule. In high school I got big into Mark Rothko, and my parents sweetly schlepped to the MoMA to buy a Rothko poster and frame it for my birthday. And I allow many more exceptions. Because at their best, museum gift shops are like any shops at their best: Stocked by people with good taste, knowledge of fire s**t, connections to slapper-makers, and a non-cynical personal investment in supporting / exposing / selling that s**t to curious people…

And so, in today’s Plane, we’re shouting out the slappiest, vibiest, & coolest museum shops we’ve encountered — mostly smallish and medium-sized ones — where the shelves are stocked with actual gems.

As with other stores, the size of a museum tends to correlate inversely to the charm of its shop: The bigger an institution gets, the wacker their wares are likely to become, and the chumpier you tend to feel browsing them. But even that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and we’ve included a few relatively bigger places that deserve it.

All of these museums have webshops. And they’re all fantastic places to visit even if you go “Papa Spyplane” Mode and never set foot in the shop.

BTW 🫂 “Unbeatable Crowdsourcing” Alert 🫂 We’re focusing almost exclusively on places we have firsthand experience with. Since Spy Nation is, per capita, the most tasteful & international readership across all newsletters — armed to the teeth with state-of-the-art built-in anti-chump-detectors — we know you have great intel, too. Hit the comments to share any and all spots, large or small, that sell actually cool stuff as opposed to chintzy / sauceless junk… !!

Let’s get to it !

• No crib is truly operating at peak vibe levels without a bronze Paolo Soleri windbell (above left) SWANGING somewhere within its walls or without. These are coppable via Soleri’s Cosanti Foundation shop in Paradise Valley, Arizona, near Phoenix. I’m looking at a little one, hanging beside a window here at HQ, while I type this.

• At the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum gift shop the embroidered caps and denim shirts are aaiight, though not quite as sick as you’d hope — the real heat on hand is the special tea blends that re-create ones that O’Keeffe (a major teahead) used to keep in her pantry at Abiquiu, and sterling-silver alphabet brooches (above right) inspired by the one Alexander Calder made for O’Keeffe. (A few years back Erin wrote about a small maker who does similar custom pieces, one of which Erin copped and still rocks).

• A favorite museum we love to hit off the beaten path in Tokyo is the design-focused 21_21 Design Sight — the last time we were there they had a great show on about the making of Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, and also the location is extremely close to a top contender for our favorite pizza spot on the planet. But the reason it’s on this list is because the museum was co-created by visionary architect Tadao Ando and visionary designer Issey Miyake, and the gift shop stocks rare & ‘xclusie Issey joints, e.g. a sick reversible beige-and-pink windbreaker Erin copped that also somehow folds into a tote bag.

• This next tip is a deep cut that originated with Spyfriend Jacob Gallagher, and it’s so good I’ve passed it on to many people since, including Spyfriend Nathan Fielder when he was shooting one of the Top 5 TV shows of all time, The Curse: