Museum League: Storefront Edition
2018
Acrylic fiber
8.0 x 72.0 inches
Edition of 100

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.

Solo exhibitions of Cattelan’s work have been organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2000); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2001); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2002–03); P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, now MoMA PS1, New York (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2003); Musée du Louvre, Paris (2004); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2008); The Menil Collection, Houston (2010); and Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2013). His work has also been featured in the Venice Biennale (1993, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2003, and 2011), L’hiver de l’amour at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1994), SITE Santa Fe (1997), Manifesta 2 (1998), Istanbul Biennial (1998), Kunsthalle Basel (1999), Whitney Biennial (2004), Traces du Sacré at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2008), and theanyspacewhatever at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008). A retrospective of Cattelan’s work opened in the fall of 2011 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Cattelan also founded The Wrong Gallery in 2002, a store window in New York City that allowed for greater freedom in art interventions, which he found lacking in the city’s commercial galleries. Cattelan lives and works in New York and Milan, though he declared himself retired in 2011. He is currently devoting his practice to Catteland, his line of products and accessories that focuses on the democratization of the artistic idea making art accessible to all.