Museu Duty Free, 2019
Museu Duty Free is an installation conceived as a museum shop, a space where commodification, reproduction, and artistic value are critically examined through the aesthetics of commerce.
The project began in 2007 at the National History Museum in Lisbon, with a second iteration for a solo exhibition in Luanda in 2014. The latter was inspired by the informal wooden street shops, hand-painted by artists known as Langas in Kumbundu, a northern Angolan dialect. These highly skilled painters create visual identities for small businesses, turning commerce into a site of artistic expression and cultural storytelling.
This work interrogates the historical construction of Art History as a discipline and the institutionalization of the ‘Museum’ as a space of sanctioned value. Museum shops, as extensions of these institutions, transform artworks into commodities, raising critical questions about authenticity, reproduction, and the economic circuits of art. What does it mean when an artwork is no longer encountered in the ‘aura’ of its original context but is instead consumed as a souvenir, a T-shirt, or a poster?
Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), examines how mechanical reproduction disrupts the ‘aura’ of an artwork, liberating it from ritualistic and hierarchical structures. Yet, in the contemporary art world, the paradox remains: even as art is reproduced and democratized, it is also embedded in the logic of speculative markets and privatization. The museum shop, then, becomes a space where this paradox is laid bare—a site where cultural value is mediated by economic exchange.
At the same time, Silvia Federici’s reflections on capitalism and reproductive labor in Caliban and the Witch (2004) offer another crucial lens through which to view Museu Duty Free. If Federici describes the enclosure of common lands as a foundational moment in capitalist history, we might similarly consider the museum as a mechanism of cultural enclosure—extracting and commodifying artistic production while erasing the labor and communal practices that sustain it. What is the role of the museum shop within this process? Is it merely a continuation of capitalist accumulation, or could it also be subverted as a space of counter-memory, resistance, and redistribution?
After all these years, how have exhibition values evolved?
What role do art fairs play in shaping cultural significance?
Are art fairs the new museums?
Are museum shops the new gateways to art collecting?
Do artists fuel markets that, in turn, enable money laundering?
Do collectors desire art duty-free—untethered from context, history, and labor?
Museu Duty Free is a site-specific installation, ideally suited for a gallery or art fair, where the economies of art and commerce converge. It consists of objects typically found in museum shops—T-shirts, bags, posters, hand-painted ceramics, and souvenirs. Each piece is handmade and unique, complicating the idea of mass reproduction. While the installation functions as a cohesive whole, the individual objects can be sold separately, mirroring the logic of both institutional merchandising and the fragmentation of cultural value.
By situating Museu Duty Free within these tensions, the project asks us to rethink the politics of display, circulation, and exchange in the contemporary art world. Can the shop become a site of critique rather than compliance? Can it expose the contradictions of the art economy rather than merely sustain them? In a world where value is increasingly determined by market forces, what remains of art’s radical potential?
RitaGT 2019-2025
