From Ice Cream to Bunnies, Can Anything Become a Museum?
With Instagram rites of passage like the Museum of Ice Cream to hyper-specific enclaves dedicated to dinnerware, defining a museum has never been so complex
Since its 2016 debut as a roving pop-up in NYC’s Meatpacking District, the Museum of Ice Cream has been a divisive presence. While most of the fine art world scoffs at what they see as a series of glorified selfie backdrops with sugar, influencers and families reliably flock to the fixture’s color-drenched halls for photo opps and the chance to dive into vats of sprinkles and swing on a giant banana. Artnet has called it a “bastardization of the term ‘museum’” full of “brain-liquefying attractions.” Eater, among many others, said it was more of an “Instagram thirst trap than an actual museum.”
But outside of the Museum of Ice Cream’s blush pink storefront in SoHo, a long line of TikTokers, tourists, and children (sometimes, a terrifying combination of the three) is spilling out onto the street. You can’t say the same for the Frick Collection. But this queue is waiting for a fantastical world of cotton candy-hued walls, sprinkle-filled pools, and joyful shrieks. Co-founder Manish Vora described it to me as “a place for joy and connection.” Based on the museum’s rapid expansion—there are now seven permanent locations around the world—that mission is a resounding success.
The Museum of Ice Cream is just the cherry topping a cascade of new, increasingly popular so-called institutions—consider the Selfie Museum in Seattle, and roving exhibitions like the Balloon Museum or the Museum of Illusions—all of which have been testing the boundary between what’s a bonafide cultural landmark and what’s a glorified Chuck-E-Cheese. Even more established modern art museums, like The Broad or MoMA, have been incorporating more “experience-forward” exhibitions of late—photogenic favorites like Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror rooms and art collective Random International’s Rain Room—which have attracted hordes of museum goers ready for their close-ups.
The rooms, which have since become Instagram rites of passage, irked some museum purists who questioned their potential to incite true artistic reflection. But what even constitutes a museum? And who has the right to take on the title?
“A museum is a reflection of what society finds important in that time, in that period,” says Marisol Garcia, an education specialist for K–through–12 school communities at The Getty Art Museum in Los Angeles. “And they stay in our memories because they reflect something about us, too, of what we value, what we want to be, who we want to be, how we want to be seen.”
In other words, museums are deeply personal, which explains why academics and curators have been sparring over what qualifies as a museum for decades. Most recently, after a heated 18 months of deliberation, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) changed its official definition to emphasize the important roles that inclusivity, accessibility, and sustainability play: “A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.”
This new definition is ostensibly meant to be all-encompassing—20 of ICOM’s members conferred with over 120 national committees to formulate it. However, the attempt to broaden a museum’s meaning still didn’t satisfy everyone. Inkyung Chang, the director of the Iron Museum in Seoul, Korea, and current Vice President of ICOM, said, “It’s not progressive enough for me.”
I texted my art history friend asking for her definition of a museum, to which she replied, “I don’t know. A place with stuff?”
To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of conventional museums. On a trip to the Natural History Museum in third grade, I stared blankly at the taxidermied grizzly bears behind glass, not knowing what or how I was supposed to think about them. The mix of dark halls and fluorescent lights gave me a headache, my class’s dawdling around in the exhibits made me feel restless, and I was hungry and tired from all the walking and the lack of snacks. Now, as an adult, when friends come to visit me in New York City, at least one of the city’s 170 museums is at the top of their list, and it’s the same routine: We gaze at a canvas and pretend to have a transformative experience, then get separated after 30 minutes. I end up shooting a text along the lines of, “I found a bench by the exit, but no rush.” They do not rush.
But while I may not find the meaning of life in the works of Yves Klein, I do get very excited by the strange rat corpses on toast at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A.’s Culver City and the rabbit figurines at The Bunny Museum in Altadena. So maybe it’s not that I don’t like all museums, it’s just that not all museums speak to me. Nor should they have to.
“Museums are defined by their goals […] you care for your collection, and you use it to educate people,” says Margaret Carney, founder of the International Museum of Dinnerware Design in Kingston, New York. There, everyday objects like enamel kitchen tables, Roy Rogers lunchboxes, and vintage can openers are on display. The items may not be as old as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, but every teapot and serving platter tells a story that its niche audience appreciates. “People who have accumulated and collected items on purpose, like clocks or frying pans, I think they’re to be celebrated. It’s just whether or not they can organize enough and get people to enjoy it.”
Based on that metric, I asked the Getty’s Garcia if anything can be a museum. “Could I charge admission to my bedroom and call it a museum dedicated to the private life of a woman in her mid-twenties?” Garcia says I absolutely could.
“All of the stuff at the Getty Villa was once in somebody’s house,” she says. “Some of it probably was prized goods, and other stuff […] those ancient people might be mortified that we have on display. So in many ways, your bedroom may be in a museum one day.”
Despite all of the criticisms surrounding the Museum of Ice Cream and its ilk, fans seem unbothered by the upturned noses of the art world. And neither is Vora. “Being accepted by the art world is almost like a death knell to not being exposed to the public,” he says. “That name [museum] was designed to ping this slight controversy. It's meant to be disruptive. At the end of the day, the arts and entertainment are completely intertwined. To me, museums are ultimately also in the category of entertainment.”
While not everyone agrees, I can’t help but fantasize that all of my possessions could be future prized artifacts. Or maybe in a hundred years, there will be a museum dedicated to exploring why the Museum of Ice Cream and its derivatives were invaluable for the culture, and the art world will have egg on its face. What it all boils down to is that no one is the true dictator of taste when it comes to what’s worthy of appreciation and preservation. I just know that if I had to choose between strolling through the Met or downing a few cones of Rocky Road, I’d pick the latter.