OK Instagrammers, can we agree that this is the last one? After we scrolled through countless pastel explosions from the Ice Cream Museum and have started bracing ourselves for #riperoom hashtags from the Avocado Museum, we’re not sure we can take what the Museum of Pizza will bring.
Oh yes, there’s yet another pop-up museum coming, and with every announcement, our inner cynic starts seeing them as being less about whatever carbs they’re supposedly celebrating and more about providing well-curated backgrounds for selfie takers. And the people behind the Museum of Pizza aren’t even pretending otherwise. "Pizza is more than a food, it’s a cultural phenomenon," Kareem Rahma, the Museum’s founder, told NBC New York. "With The Museum of Pizza, we’re combining our passion for storytelling and pop culture to fuel discovery, friendship, art, music and selfies. Lots of selfies."
Oh.
Cool.
Get your Amaro and Gingham filters ready then, because this thing will open its doors from October 13 until October 28, and it promises to be the “the world's first and only immersive art experience celebrating pizza.” What does that mean? Mostly that it’s going to cost $35 so you can take photographs in front of the The Museum of Pizza artists’ "gallery" (the quotes are theirs, so do with that what you will).
The Museum has released a promo film and, boy is it something. A dude wearing a pair of Calvin Klein briefs seductively feeds a slice to a woman who looks like she fell out of an American Apparel catalog. Everyone moans. A slice of pizza is tapped against a crotch. There are additional moans. It’s all very Terry Richardson-meets-marinara sauce (and Eater already scratched its head over the “bizarrely sexual” imagery).
In addition to...all of that, your ticket also entitles you to one slice of pizza from an as-yet-unidentified source, as well as free reign to explore the pizza cave, pizza fun house, pizza beach and possibly some other nouns that they’ve just dropped the word “pizza” in front of.
Although it might be the first pizza-themed “immersive art experience” or whatever, it’s definitely not the first pizza museum – and not even the only pizza museum that was announced this week. In 2012, the real first pizza museum opened in the Pizza Brain restaurant in Philadelphia, showcasing owner Bryan Dwyer’s Guinness World Record-setting collection of ‘za-related memorabilia.
In 2015, Kendall Bruns opened his own Pizza Museum in Chicago, with his own stash of pizza kitsch; its real-life debut was short-lived, so now its permanent home is on the internet. And, earlier this week, the original location of Pizza Hut was opened as a museum on the Wichita State campus. According to the Associated Press, Pizza Hut founders Dan and Frank Carney were students at the university when they opened their first P-Hut, and the museum will show how the chain evolved from a campus eatery to a worldwide chain with more than 10,000 locations.
“Cities like New York don't need a place like this," Dwyer told The Guardian when his museum opened its doors. "Philadelphia does."
But does Instagram?
