McMona? Or, When Museums Become a Bit Too Popular

Quick. What do you think of when someone mentions Paris?

Romantic strolls along the Seine at dusk? Baguettes with butter and jam and coffee for breakfast at some charming bistro? World class art across its myriad museums? Whether or not to supersize your Quarter Pounder meal?

Well the truth of the matter, according to the UK's Daily Telegraph, is that

France has become McDonald's biggest market in the world outside of the US, according to the chain. While business in traditional brasseries and bistros is in freefall, the fast food group opened 30 new outlets last year in France and welcomed 450 million customers – up 11 per cent on the previous year.

And so I guess it was only a matter of time until this happened:

Lovers of France's two great symbols of cultural exception – its haute cuisine and fine art – are aghast at plans to open a McDonald's restaurant and McCafé in the Louvre museum next month.

America's fast food temple is celebrating its 30th anniversary in France with a coup -the opening of its 1,142nd Gallic outlet a few yards from the entrance to the country's Mecca of high art and the world's most visited museum.

The chain faces a groundswell of discontent among museum staff, many already unhappy about the Louvre lending its name and works to a multi-million pound museum project in Abu Dhabi.

"This is the last straw," said one art historian working at the Louvre, who declined to be named. "This is the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy and very unpleasant odours in the context of a museum," he told the Daily Telegraph.

Didier Rykner, head of The Art Tribune website found the idea "shocking".

"I'm not against eating in a museum but McDonald's is hardly the height of gastronomy," he said, adding that it was a worrying mixture of art and consumerism. "Today McDonald's, tomorrow low-cost clothes shops," he said.

At a certain point, protesting such things simply feeds into the "art world types are elitist" narrative. When the truth of the matter is, who really cares? Most museums, including the Louvre (see here), are already marketing themselves as little more than culture theme parks as it is. Debating whether McDonalds is the last straw is a bit like debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Museums need bigger crowds to operate and grow, and those crowds will feel more welcome if the museums recognize and attend to their wants and needs.

The only thing I regret in all this, honestly, is the ability to slow down and reflect upon a work of art or two in a museum without being jostled or rushed by the movement of the hordes. Having visited one of New York's premier museums with Bambino yesterday (a Sunday...what kind of idiots are we, eh? The kind that work other days, but...) to find it only slightly more crowded and yet remarkably less pleasant than the 42nd Street subway station during rush hour, I couldn't wait to get out of there. There were miraculous things to behold, but no mental or physical room in which to do so.

A while back we discussed Michael Kimmelman's response a trip to a museum in which he noted how current generations of museum goers fly through, snapping photos like they were running a marathon. Michael noted of his visit how, "Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute."

If that museum were anywhere near as packed as the one we visited yesterday, it's no wonder. How could they pause that long? They'd be trampled.

So what's the answer? Do you make the museums less welcoming, so that there's more room to spend time with the works? If you do that, though, will you have to make them more expensive?

Museum directors, who are having to cut staff and programming, I'm sure are thinking "Screw you, Winkleman. We need as many visitors as we can get." But that's where I begin to wonder...to do what? File through like cattle? Is that the goal? Indeed, I'm beginning to wonder if the behavior Kimmelman lamented isn't the natural result of the way museums are attracting visitors. A McDonalds in the basement? Like one could get near enough to it to be offended anyway.