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sold after the first five days. The social media had made the pink and pastel-colou-
red ice cream scenery a success even before it had been opened. In the meantime,
the Museum of Ice Cream ranks among the ten worldwide most popular “museums”
on Instagram – together with the Paris Louvre and the New York Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art. More than 200,000 posts can be found under the hashtag #museumo-
ficecream and the colourful playground for adults led to copies all over the world.

Generating familiar images ...

What they all have in common is not only the idea of actively using the many staged
settings for posing, photographing and filming but also providing perfect lighting,
mirrors to check one’s own photo-suitability – and of charging quite substantial “ad-
mission fees”. If museum specialists, curators and exhibition designers should now
be thinking that this case study could be simply transferred into their own institu-
tion, beforehand it must be mentioned that there is no blueprint for the success in
the ballpark of the Museum of Ice Cream. The model can definitely be nevertheless Fotos: Markus Wörgötter, mumok, Wien
used if those responsible know the current needs of the visitors and how to interpret
their behaviour: Especially the younger target groups expect something new before
they focus on museum collections at all. They furthermore have the desire to share
and thus increase their own popularity. (That the popularity of the institutions is li- Auch die temporäre Ausstellung „Vertigo“ (2019) in Wien ... • The temporary Vertigo (2019) show in Vienna ...
kewise increased, is an attractive side effect in the process). Visually interesting
images – with or without a selfie – are therefore the be all and end all of every new
exhibition design: If people are willing to post photographs of their meals, they will
also do this for anything with a cultural experiential value.
... and sharing them as well

It is thus not an issue of lowering one’s own expectations regarding visitors or of
dealing with an audience whose attention span is getting shorter and shorter but of
offering something that makes people talk and share on the internet. After all, the
social media are the new mouth-to-mouth propaganda. Pop-up installations in pla-
ces which had not been accessible or not for everyone, mobile museums or exhibits,
visually strong settings, novel stagings of new or also well-known objects, tactile or
immersive experiences, reactive media formats, an innovative approach to storytel-
ling, the integration of performance art, a direct participation by the visitors as well
as experimental strategies or unusual cooperations can thus not only be a foretaste.
They can likewise produce access to new contents, themes and values just as to edu-
cational facilities and cultural institutions and even activate vacancies. They can
open the door to a cosmos rich in content which hides behind the low-threshold pro-
duction and thus turn non-visitors into enthusiastic fans.

Producing room for substance ... zog nicht zuletzt durch beliebte Fotospots ... • ... not last due to favourite photo spots ...

Selfie museums accordingly do not represent an existential threat to all the traditional
museums. On the contrary: well integrated as a complementary element, they are ... ein breit gefächertes Publikum ins Mumok. • ... attracted a broad audience to the Mumok.
able to improve the exhibition experience and have the result that a museum exceeds
the expectations of the visitors. With this kind of production, a new perspective can
be developed and the place of museums can be newly negotiated. What actually is
a museum? Which are the topics discussed here? How do I equally integrate people
and society? How do I activate non-visitors? How do I turn my facility into a relevant
“third place”? Selfie spots can be a valuable chance to rejuvenate the time-honoured
formats of communication and to ensure getting more attention in the population
once again. Yes, of course, selfies could even stimulate debates in the social networks
far beyond a museum since they involve people who are not (right now) traditional
museum visitors. With all the positive aspects regarding attention, it is still to be de-
sired that the museum remains a place of education – a place of learning, contempla-
tion and amazement. A place which is publicly accessible, serves society and its de-
velopment, purchases objects, preserves, researches, displays and a lot of communi-
cates. And that the conceptuality of “museum” remains “protected” in this sense.
And, in the end, selfie museums are not true museums but rather artificial installati-
ons transcending between an artistic playground and an artificial world of experi-
ence. As such, they apparently often oft cause more excitement than many a temple
of culture – and thogether with this, but also only on this, we should work …

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