Museum League: Storefront Edition by Maurizio Cattelan

Museum League is a scarf collection by Maurizio Cattelan dedicated to major museums and cultural institutions around the world, based on the consideration that museums and cultural spaces are becoming places where a sense of community and a process of identification, passion, and faith take place. Everyone has his/her favorite place, the one where he/she feels at home, the one he/she wants to support and share with others—often close to a sense of belonging that the sports fans feel at the stadium.

Museum gift shops are places crossed by the same art audience as the cultural space of the museum itself, but, in most cases, they have nothing to do with the museum and its contents. Visitors are forced to pass through as if they were in a gas station shop, without a link with the experiences they have just had in front of the artworks. Why shouldn’t the shops be part of the aesthetic experience? Why leave the artists and works outside the last room of the building? Museum League poses a heretical question: that in a museum art should stay right up to the exit door to the road.

Maurizio Cattelan was born in Padua, Italy, in 1960. Cattelan, who has no formal training and considers himself an “art worker” rather than an artist, has often been characterized as the court jester of the art world. This label speaks not only to his taste for irreverence and the absurd, but also his profound interrogation of socially ingrained norms and hierarchies, subjects historically only available to the court fool.