Museum Shop

What is your most favorite area in the museum?!

Mine in the Uffizi Museum was its shop, they have recreated jewelry from their painting collection, which was very interesting for me!

The complicated relationship between art and commerce has a home in the museum gift shop.

Contributing up to as much as a quarter of museum revenue, gift shops can be crucial to a museum’s bottom line, but their contributions aren’t only economic. These unique retail spaces help educate visitors, build the museum’s brand, and work to highlight — and sometimes even influence — the aspects of art the institution views as important.

Because basically, stores are like the ultimate cheat sheet — the more you see a piece of art referenced, the more important it probably is. Some visitors even “begin with the shop in order to find out what is important to see in the museum!” says Sharon Macdonald, director of the Center for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage and professor of social anthropology at the Humboldt University of Berlin.