For Arianna to be so kind as to allow me a guest entry in her blog, the least I can do is be up-front. This will not be a positive review of the ‘Museum of Ice Cream.’ It will be a cynical tour through the six or seven soulless rooms within it, laced in ridicule at every step. So I will start by saying something positive about the place before we get into it.
The creator of this monstrosity is a genius. It is the most self-fulfilling, self-sustaining, unstoppable force of a business imaginable. Its very purpose is to be marketed by its paying guests. The lack of content or value is irrelevant. Whether you love it or hate it, this is a place to be seen, and a place to be slapped all over the social media feeds of every person who steps foot in it. This kicks off the chain of like-minded millennials who then do the same.
To the founder, ice cream is totally irrelevant. They probably don’t even like ice cream. But what they have done, is to exploit the worst habits of teens and twenty-somethings by charging them $30 to earn the right to market their business to everyone they know. It’s nothing more than a photo opportunity. It’s brilliant.
Upon the more derelict surroundings of downtown LA, it is not difficult to spot. Painted entirely pink and with sprinkles littered throughout the gutters nearby, you can be fairly sure you’re in the right spot. You wait in line before being called forward to be insincerely dazzled with talk of the wonders you are about to experience. You’re then made to scream ‘ice cream’ three times as it begins to dawn on you what you’ve signed up for.
The first room is lined on both sides with telephones. A Yelp review tells me that a celebrity talks to you about what you are about to experience. It didn’t say which celebrity, as presumably it isn’t important… Baskin, Ben or Jerry I’d imagine. I have to go entirely off the Yelp review for this information, as the telephone didn’t work for us. Nor did it work for anyone else in our group. Not that it mattered of course. That’s not why you’re there. “Hey, get a picture of me with the phone. Actually can I borrow yours too? There we go. Two telephones in this picture – one for each ear. I am different in a truly pioneering and brilliant manner.” We moved on.
We had our first taste of ice cream in room two. Some sort of caramel concoction with a corn syrup. It was ok. Secondary of course though to the photo opportunity overload going on around you. At this point I realised I was the last person Arianna should have brought to this. At least with a friend they could shamelessly indulge in the ‘gram fest without judgement and scorn from within their own camp. I felt bad. I tried to enjoy it. We sat ourselves on the swings and we swung having asked someone to take a photo. I put every modicum of effort I had into making it look like I was having a good time – for her. The friend of the person taking the photo then says to me “Look like you’re having a good time! Jeeez…” Even my most forced attempts to enjoy this place weren’t up to the moronic benchmark it demands.
The next step in our journey was into a room with plastic bananas hanging from the ceiling – one side yellow, one side pink. No banana ice cream on offer though. I was struggling to make the link.
The following room was my favourite of the lot – the mint room. This was in part due to my favourite ice cream flavour being mint (served in Mochi form – never had before, will definitely be having again!), and in part because there were no real photo opportunities in here. The 3 or 4 minutes we spent in this room it was just Arianna, myself and the Mochi distributor. No one else hung around. This did not surprise me.
Meandering through various other uneventful exhibitions, you end up in the sprinkle pool – an undersized, unsanitary pink swimming pool filled with sprinkles. Plastic sprinkles of course, but Instagram doesn’t need to know that. Arianna humoured her surroundings and went for a dip, for which I don’t blame her. There was no purpose to being here other than a photo opportunity, and no one wants to feel like they wasted their Friday night. She lay in the sprinkles, took a Snapchat selfie, and captioned it ‘Dreams do come true’, her face surrounded by plastic sprinkles. Little plastic sprinkles of deceit.
Your time in the pool is called; you put your shoes on and are inevitably led into the gift shop. My sincere apologies to the ‘Museum of Ice Cream’ if I have this wrong, but unless I missed it there is in fact no ice cream sold in the gift shop for the ‘Museum of Ice Cream,’ which rather splendidly sums up this latest addition to Los Angeles’ cultural landscape. You can pay $12 for a jar of sprinkles though (real this time, I assume).
To conclude, what justifies the time spent writing this, given it is effectively a glorified moan? What damage to the world does the existence of the ‘Museum of Ice Cream’ actually have? It provided a group of young, enthusiastic, borderline-unhinged-in-cases people with employment. The people who engaged with the installations seemed to have a good time. It allowed me to exercise my right given to me by my nation to enjoy an overtly cynical moan. So no harm done here, right?
No. The ‘Museum of Ice Cream’ in some (admittedly small) way works towards exacerbating a far bigger problem facing millennials today, one that isn’t even self-imposed. Concepts like the ‘Museum of Ice Cream’ take the adage of ‘it’s the journey, not the destination that matters,’ and flip it on its head. The Museum of Ice Cream has nothing to do with the journey. There is no voyage of discovery here into the world of ice cream (not that there ever needed to be – their message, not mine). There is nothing here that makes you feel richer for having gone. The opportunity to disguise a science lesson was even overlooked (the place was crying out for some liquid nitrogen).
Only one thing matters with ‘The Museum of Ice Cream’ and that is the destination. And the destination is Instagram. Once again, a generation is being taught that it is more important to be seen somewhere than it is to have gained something from the experience. Styling this particular exercise as a museum is especially troubling. God forbid any of these kids visited an actual museum, only to find there were no popsicles sticking out of the wall or bananas hanging from the ceiling – just the crushing disappointment of photo opportunities being replaced with knowledge… and insight… and ergh……. thought provoking content (scream emoji).
The ‘Museum of Ice Cream’ is another brick in the wall, on one side of which is a generation of Instagrammers and on the other side is enriching life experiences. Social media is a recent phenomenon and hopefully the desire to replace value with hashtags is generational. Otherwise in 30 years we may find ourselves in a situation where the footfall of the Natural History Museum will indeed be exceeded by that of the Museum of Fidget Spinners.
The Art of Being Basic 
That British kid is very insightful.