Ivory Tower or Discotheque? The Commercialization of Superstar Museums

Nowadays museums are deeply embedded in a global competitive scenario, where the pastiche of cultural genres led to the enrichment and spread of the general competitive environment. Whether on the one hand museums are still considered, and should necessarily be considered, as repositories par excellence of the artistic good, on the other hand globalization has urged them to adopt more and more market logics and strategies in order to survive.
The debate around globalization and commodification of culture outlines the scenario of this dissertation that intends to analyze with a strategic viewpoint the museums’ need of leveraging more and more on market revenues and consequently on the business side of their strategic management.
The attempt of evaluating the possible additional revenue sources for the American superstar museums is epitomized by the extreme, or better to say drastic commercialization pursued by the Guggenheim Museum during the Krensian era (1988-2008) and crystallized by the establishment of international satellites, compared by the critics to an art-McDonald franchise.
Collections have been losing their importance, while bookshops are crucially overrated, ascending the museum building in terms of square foot acquisition. They have even become proper shops, able to sustain themselves ad absurdum, generating revenues through visitors/impulse buyers, who purchase the superstar brand deprived by any artistic content. This is the case, among the others, of MoMA and Metropolitan satellite shops, opened not only in the States but also around the globe to satisfy international buyers, who don’t need to experience the museum anymore, but are just driven by their compulsive interest in having a piece of its brand.