Ratlinks Redux: Millennial Museums
Would you rather be rich or famous or spend time at a museum for ice cream?
TAKE A PICTURE IT WILL LAST LONGER
Would you rather be rich or famous?
While both are not mutually exclusive, for the purpose of this debate, you can only pick one.
Which do you choose?
Celeb Status or Baller Status
The overwhelming majority polled picked wealth over fame and not because money buys you happiness. Instead, most voiced that privacy is more valuable than recognition.
If asked this question at the start of the last decade, January 1st 2010, your answer might be different.
That was a simpler time. Selfies weren’t yet invented nor perfected as the most advanced smartphone was the iPhone 3S, equipped with only a rear-facing camera.
If you bumped into a celebrity in 2010 you had few options:
Hope you had charged your digital camera
Be a complete psycho and ask for an autograph
Have an awkward conversation with said celebrity in the hopes that you could tell your friends about it later. A conversation that likely went like this: You won’t believe who I met! usually followed by the response “Did you get a photo?”
In search of that perfect instagrammable moment, everything has become a photo op.
Even Taylor Swift, an artist famous for calling out her Starbucks-lovers, now wants to be more private.
I used to be like a golden retriever, just walking up to everybody, like, wagging my tail. “Sure, yeah, of course! What do you want to know? What do you need?” Now, I guess, I have to be a little bit more like a fox.
Of course, I got a photo. Can you place this A-lister? Hint: zoom in the lower-left corner
DYKER LIGHTS
In 1986, when Dyker Heights resident and “decorating freak” Lucy Spata began a tradition of over the top Christmas lights, her neighbors were non-plussed.
Today things have changed. Residents of Dyker Heights, in southern Brooklyn, are all in on Christmas lights and willingly spend upwards of $4,000 on energy to keep their houses lit 🔥. Letting their neighborhood be overrun by tourists, some even arriving via tour buss, all with a phone in hand in order to get that perfect Instagram shot.
If you venture to Dyker Heights, during the holiday season, almost every single damn house is lit up with the over-the-top panache of the Griswold family home. The neighborhood is pure abundance of extravagant lighted debauchery. - Harmon Leon for the Observer.com
Did you notice that scary looking Santa on the far left? If not go back and really drink it in.
MATCHY MATCHY
In September, my family ventured to a pumpkin patch. Upon arriving we saw numerous families wearing matching t-shirts. This frightened me as we were at a farm in Long Island, not Disney World. There was no need for any family to wear matching orange and black t-shirts saying something like “The Petersen’s Pick Pumpkins 2019”.
Editors Note: alliteration and the current year are a necessity when designing family shirts.
Entering the farm, I thanked my wife for allowing us to have our own right to personal expression via clothing choice. However, that feeling didn’t last long, as I looked at my son and 30 other kids playing in a pumpkin patch in similar flannel shirts. So much for individuality. At least our photos had the perfect fall aesthetic.
ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?
The search for the perfect experience has permeated into the far corners of high-brow culture, reaching the museum.
Previously, when the word museum is mentioned a few words came to mind:
School field trip, modern art, dioramas, docents maybe the planetarium.
Not anymore.
Use Your Illusion
Today’s millennial museum experience is all about the experience all while costing three times more than what it takes to enter New York’s Museum of Natural History.
Museums displayed art once but now that achievement is a backdrop for a human face. All aesthetics ignored, they come to show how bold they are, and stunned.
Take cado, a museum devoted to the avocado or the Museum of Illusions where one goes from room to room waiting to take a perfect Instagram photo.
The Museum of Illusions would be interesting if it was original.
I can’t hate it though. In 2017, I attended a similar pop-up.
Don’t worry if you already purchased tickets or attended this museum, you will still get a photo cool enough to generate some pity likes.
I’m Missing You Like Candy
Candytopia is a candy-focused museum that describes itself as:
What if an eccentric chocolatier and a daredevil pop star had a whirlwind romance, got married while skydiving, and had a glamorous, glittering love child who grew up to rule a small nation?
Much like the Museum of Pizza, Candytopia sounds great in theory. Until you find yourself coming down from a sugar high, surrounded by twenty screaming kids in a pool full of plastic marshmallows while an employee attempts to freestyle but only spits one bar on loop:
The marshmallow pit / the marshmallow pit / it’s really lit / in the marshmallow pit
ice cream, ice cream, ice cream paint job
The experiential pièce de résistance is the Museum of Ice Cream, where entry costs $38 + taxes and fees equating to $47 all-in. Guests put price aside in order to take a pic in the extremely instagrammable sprinkle pit.
The Museum of Ice Cream recently sold a 20% interest to an investor group for $40 million dollars, giving the enterprise a completely reasonable valuation of $200 million dollars.
In turns out the museum’s parent company, Figure8 actually received the funding. Figure8 is a business that generates revenue by designing experiums, additional spaces where millennials can connect with each other.
"We created Figure8 to chart the future of how Millennials and Gen Z will want to spend their time … Globalization and technology have made the world smaller, yet people are more lonely than ever"
- Maryellis Bunn, 27-year-old Co-Founder of Figure8 and Museum of Ice Cream
Whatever your opinion is on: experiums, millennials, emotional and transformative moments or spaces created to reconnect.
One thing is certain.
Everyone wants to experience.
It is puzzling how often we are to criticize others when their experience doesn’t align with our own.
This year rather than focusing on outward appearances maybe we should all take a minute to look inward a bit more?
