On the other hand, museums and shopping centers are organized in a similar way: it is all about atriums, and corridors potentially leading to treasures. Even the word itself, a gallery, can be applied to both, a shopping gallery and an art gallery. In a modern museum, about 50% of the open space is usually given to a permanent exhibition that brands the museum in the minds of its visitors. So the Hermitage shows old European art, the Tretyakov Gallery is proud of its Russian art, the Tate Modern is about modern art. As for the other 50% of the space, it is given to temporary exhibitions, which must get maximum attention for a short time and bring the visitors who are usually not interested in these museums.
From Kusama to ice-cream
The increasing popularity of social media, especially the visual ones such as Instagram provides for truly unlimited opportunities for a shopping centre to create its own culture and entertainment oases. The subject and items must be carefully selected and organized in a way to help the visitors make fantastic selfies for their social media accounts. These selfie-museums are often blamed for oversimplifying, while I personally do not find anything wrong about making an interesting space that would present a visitor with a nice and easy to understand cultural and esthetic experience, which they are willing to pay for and share in social media.
Success of such museums lies in their nature. They are more about being attraction parks for adults, children’s ball pits and springboards, beautiful photo zones rather than traditional rooms with paintings. Any room can be turned into something called "instamuseum", if there is the ceiling and a roof, but it obviously better if it has developer finish, air-conditioning, windows and roller blinds, and a clearly marked entrance. It can be located anywhere in a shopping centre.
Instamuseums have been popular in the USA and Europe since 2015 and though there are some in Russia, it is not a newspaper sensation yet. I could mention a museum of 3D paintings Voobrazharium in Riviera shopping centre, a “selfie-museum” FotoLand in Vegas Kuntsevo shopping centre, and some more temporary exhibitions organized in locations which used to have a bad reputation for being vacant for too long. Also, do not mix an instamuseum with an exhibition of paintings you can buy. The best feature of instamuseums is that there are no masterpieces, they only present installations or theme spaces where interesting objects serve as a background, a frame for the masterpieces created in real time. And the results of such interaction of the visitors and the museum content can only be seen on their private pages in social media.