Exhibit and point of sale: negotiating commerce and culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research at the Vancouver Art Gallery gift shop, this article considers the role of consumption and commercial activity in a cultural institution. It highlights the slippage between staff members' perceptions of ‘consumer culture’ and the consuming practices of visitors by problematizing competing understandings of the ‘visitor experience’ and analyzing the habitus of the shop staff. I argue that staff members' allegiances to an artistic habitus lead them to construe commerce and culture as distinct and opposing realms in the institution and to interpret their customers' interactions with art objects and shop merchandise according to this opposition. Geographers have argued in recent years that oppositions between culture and commerce are neither empirically nor epistemologically tenable, and yet a tendency remains in the consumption literature to regard shoppers as either naively complicit in the commercialization of culture or knowingly transgressive of the boundaries between commerce and culture, a tendency that reinforces and naturalizes the opposition of commerce and culture. If we are ever to understand consumption outside of this framework, I argue, we must direct some attention towards those who observe consumers and the ‘cultured’ place from which observation proceeds.