The Art Angle Podcast: Is the Museum of Ice Cream the Future of Art, or Just a Sugar Rush?

Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that
delves into the places where the art world meets the real world,
bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join host Andrew
Goldstein every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in
museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own
writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top
experts in the field.

There’s a buzzy new museum taking over New York, and it boasts
the types of specs that would make competitors drool. Now housed in
a prime 25,000-square-foot building in the hip
SoHo neighborhood, this fresh destination has welcomed more than
1.5 million visitors since it launched as a pop-up back in 2016,
and its $39 ticket price is higher than any major museum in
America. But it’s not the Museum of Modern Art… or a traditional
art museum at all. It’s the Museum of Ice Cream.

This magical cash cow—last year, venture capitalists valued it
at more than $200 million—is a tour de force in the realm of the
experience economy. It has spawned throngs of imitators
hoping to replicate what co-founders Maryellis Bunn and Manish Vora
have termed an “experium,” or an attraction that combines a
memorable (and Instagrammable) in-person “experience” with the
cultural enrichment of a classical museum (or some of it, anyway).
Instead of art on pedestals or in gilded frames, the MOIC presents
visitors with a giant pool filled with plastic sprinkles, an
ice-cream-themed slide traversing three floors, and many more sweet
visual treats. Instead of erudite texts penned by a curator or
academic, the walls next to the various sights boast QR-codes that
allow visitors to access branded selfie filters. You get the
picture.

For this week’s episode of the Art Angle, Artnet News national
art critic Ben Davis braved the Presidents’ Day weekend crowds to
get a taste of the MOIC’s hot-pink environments and oh-so-cool
installations so he could report back with his impressions. As he
identified back in 2016, Bunn and Vora’s creation is one of the
attractions luring visitors across demographics into a stampede
toward what he calls “Big Fun Art“:
immersive, flashy spectacles that prize social interaction over
personal edification. So what does the Museum of Ice Cream’s four
years (and counting) of resounding success signal for the future of
museums and cultural attractions on a wider scale? Is this the
solidification of a sugar-spun phenomenon, or will this trend be
licked before too long?

Listen below and subscribe to the Art Angle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Or
catch up on past
episodes here on Artnet News.)

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the Future of Art, or Just a Sugar Rush? appeared first on
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