The museum products are an excellent way to extend the activities beyond the program.
The shop itself is laid out like a museum, with products beautifully displayed around a white wooden sculpture depicting a placidly smiling face.
Of course, without the Olsen twins' involvement, the duo has to be a bit blurry about whether it's actually the famous sisters on their museum's products.
Plagued by one of the worst retailing seasons in more than a decade, the Museum Company -- a chain of 99 shops and an Internet site that sell museum-related products -- is closing eight of its stores by the end of the month, including its two flagship stores in Manhattan: one on Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street and the other on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.
The museum was the product of an alliance of civic groups who wanted to lure tourists to a town best known for its vinegar and its 12th-century cathedral and piazza.
For them, this is hallowed ground.The thoroughly modern museum, clearly a product of mathematical models and digital design, nonetheless features the undulating surfaces and sense of movement that Balthasar Neumann and his Baroque contemporaries would appreciate.
Pilar O'Leary, the center's director and a lawyer with roots in Colombia, said in an interview from Washington this week that the Alameda museum was a product of the Smithsonian's new sensitivity and "a wonderful manifestation of the interest and importance of Latino culture".
The museum also showcases products that did not succeed.
The Detroit Institute of Arts, like most older American art museums, was the product of a hard-nosed, hardscrabble nation that found itself, at the end of the 19th century, on top of the world.
When my guide was taking me through BYD's "museum" of its products, she waved her hnad dismissively at a sexy electric convertible, saying the ho-hum practical sedan was the company's best-seller.
A lot of the museum's Apple products have already gone, although John says there are still mountains of computer manuals stacked up in milk crates.
