Fake food, real design: MoMA opens a mini-market in New York

Food has long been one of the most enduring obsessions in modern and contemporary art. From Flemish still lifes to Pop Art’s reflections on consumer culture, food has repeatedly served as a lens through which society and its symbolic constructions are represented, moving across media and styles to shape an ever-evolving and meaningful iconography of everyday life.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has long engaged with this tension, building a solid genealogy of works centred on the representation—often artificial—of food, many of which are now part of its permanent collection. Alongside Kichka’s Breakfast by Daniel Spoerri, Fries by Marcel Broodthaers, and Literature Sausage (Literaturwurst) by Dieter Roth, the museum also houses Pastry Case I and Two Cheeseburgers, with Everything (Dual Hamburgers) by Claes Oldenburg, including his poster for The Store, the legendary gallery that Oldenburg transformed into a deliberately ill-assorted retail space, where shelves were filled with fake replicas of perishable foods and small consumer goods.

This distinctive tradition provides the conceptual foundation for MoMA Mart Faux-Food Pop-Up, the new initiative by the MoMA Design Store, which since its founding has helped support the museum’s exhibitions and the wide range of educational programs offered by its Department of Architecture and Design.

Temporarily installed at the SoHo and Midtown locations, the Faux-Food Pop-Up seeks to reconnect MoMA’s longstanding fascination with food-themed artworks to the world of contemporary design. The project presents objects, accessories, and homeware items that imitate real foods with irony and formal precision: fruits that become containers or toys, vegetable-shaped candles, ravioli spoon rests, desserts turned into lamps, and snack-inspired sticky notes.

The result is a compendium of “fake” food products reimagined as functional design objects meant to deceive the eye and reinvent the idea of the minimarket. As Emmanuel Plat, Director of Merchandising at MoMA Retail, explains, the aim is to create a “playful environment” where art, humor, and everyday experience intersect—continuing, in an accessible and contemporary key, a curatorial line the museum has been exploring for more than a century.

Opening image: Courtesy MoMA