New York bookstore

I ran did a quick tour of NYC museums last week:  the Guggenheim, the Met, the Whitney and MOMA.  What a wonderful 24 hours!  I left NYC art drunk and with sore feet.  In this occasional “Museum Monday” series, I review museum bookstores and ask if they are worth visiting independent of the museums.  I’ve previously written about the stores at the Met and MOMA, both of which warrant visiting and surpass any other museum bookstores I’ve encountered.  The stores at the Guggenheim and the Whitney, not so much.

There are two stores at the Guggenheim Museum, one at the top and one at the bottom.  I headed straight for the exhibit ‘Great Upheaval:  Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection 1910-1918,’ winding my way up the building to see it all.  This is one of my favorite periods of art, I enjoyed learning as much as I did from the audio tour and museum labels and eagerly entered the upper store hoping to find more resources.  I was disappointed.  There was the catalogue but little else that expanded on the exhibit.  In fact, all that was in this store, book-wise, was a catalogue for the current exhibits or museum guides.  I went downstairs hoping for more enlightenment in the larger entryway store.  No such luck.  In fact, I think the online resources are stellar, but not matched by the offerings in the bookstores.   The only books that looked mildly interesting were a paltry few on a shelf behind a display cabinet.  The only way to access them would be to ask the cashier to hand them to you one-by-one, hardly inviting.  Even more surprising, there were very few books about Frank Lloyd Wright.

It wouldn’t be very hard to argue that Wright’s most iconic and well-known building is the Guggenheim, yet in the store there were far more dishes and trinkets related to the building than information on the architect.  It’s not as if there aren’t scores of books on Wright, from novels to monographs to pure scholarship; there’s something for every reader.  Any book I saw felt touristy.  I was disappointed, but I may not be the norm, the store was crammed with people buying knickknacks.

Run to the Guggenheim for the art and skip the store, unless you want salt and pepper shakers shaped like the building.

The choices are better at the Whitney Museum of American Art.  In its small lobby space, the offerings are low on trinkets and focused on books about 20th and 21st century American art, the Whitney’s core collection.  After visiting the Glenn Ligon exhibit, I became a groupie but wondered how much was written about  an artist 3 years older than me.  Quite a lot apparently, in fact the Whitney had more about Ligon than the Guggenheim had about Wright.  Each exhibit has its own ‘cubby’ for the catalogue exhibit and related books.  In addition, there is a wall of monographs and two tables of books.  The sale table was busy, so much so, I had to go over to see what the feeding frenzy was about and found museum guides for $3.  Any book with decent reproductions for $3 is a steal.  While this is a nice store, under the criteria of whether I would visit regardless of the art, I’d say no.  It’s worth stopping by when you’re there to see one of the Whitney’s fascinating exhibits, but for modern art books, head another 20 blocks south to MOMA.