Art Museum rebrands and misses a beat

Did you read that the Philadelphia Museum of Art has a new name?

It is now — hold your breath — the Philadelphia Art Museum, which the royalty that runs the place would like us to call PhAM.

PhAM?

Yeah, I know that follows the decades-old gimmick of squashing two names together to form something new and hip — like J-Lo for Jennifer Lopez, or J-Roll for Jimmy Rollins, or Brangelina for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

The last is an example of a portmanteau,  a word formed by blending the sounds and meanings of two or more other words, like "brunch" from "breakfast" and "lunch.” (Thanks, Gemini AI.)

The first two were examples of acronym/initialism, which is often called a hip-hop name or a type of stage name when referring to artists.

Then there’s “Queen Bey” for Beyonce, “Tay Tay” for Taylor Swift, and “Exhibionist Slut” for Madonna, but that’s a whole nother story.

Let’s get back to the castle on the hill.

Attendance is down from pre-Covid days, according to reporting in the Inquirer. 

For the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025, attendance was 672,484, well below the 773,511 racked up during the last full year before the plague, but still ahead of the 559,042 fans who passed through the Eagles’ turnstiles last year.

For comparison’s sake, the Phillies attendance this year was 3,375,457, while the Sixers drew 821,714. Flyers? Don’t care. I ignore them since they cancelled Kate Smith.

Anyway, like sports teams, museums can have “winning seasons,” such as when they host visiting collections of great masters, such as the Philadelphia Art Museum’s 1995 Cezanne retrospective exhibition that attracted an estimated 550,000 art lovers. 

You can’t play that gimmick every year (why not?) so the museum’s head marketing guy Paul Dien said the museum must (in a phrase I truly detest) “meet people where they are at.”

Sooo, in the name of a “more accessible vibe,” PhAM sliced one word out of its name and designed a new logo, the dragony griffin you see at the top of this column.

It has kind of a ‘30s feel to me, not exactly where people are at.

You know where more people are at?

Eeek! A movie prop?

Movie, shmovie. It is a commissioned work of art, and — hold your breath — the Rocky statue is the No. 1 most visited Philly landmark, its 4 million visitors twice as many as the Liberty Bell. 

So, really, shouldn’t the museum have used Rocky if it really wanted outreach to the great unwashed, which is what it is angling for?

I mean, if it could get 10% of the 4 million visiting Rocky, that would push attendance over a million. So, at the least, it should have a permanent Rocky Balboa collection, including movie memorabilia, scripts, posters, and all the cheesy merch connected with the franchise. And think of the gift shop possibilities! 

—-

Or change its name radically, to a brand that is known all over the world.

Rename itself Louvre.

OK, I grant you that might result in a lawsuit. There might be a workaround. Use a translation.

Roughly speaking, the French louvre translates to “ventilation grille,” which doesn’t smoothly roll off the tongue.

So let’s say we’re stuck with the Philadelphia Art Museum, but the woman I live with (a phrase sexier than “wife”) suggests that PAM is better than PhAM. And PAM.com is available.

I agree with her.

Because if I don’t she says she “will cut you off.”

I don’t know exactly what that means and I am afraid to find out.