Tiki Pop
Sven Kirsten’s 2014 book-as-exhibition-catalog for the Musée du Quai Branly exhibition of the same name. The cultural high-water mark of Polynesian Pop scholarship—the moment a French national museum of indigenous arts formally took up the American aesthetic for serious study.
The museum catalog.
Tiki Pop is the catalog for the Tiki Pop exhibition Sven Kirsten curated at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris in 2014. The Quai Branly is France’s national museum of indigenous arts—the institution that holds the country’s collections of Polynesian, African, Asian, and pre-Columbian artifacts. The Tiki Pop exhibition placed mid-century American Polynesian Pop in formal scholarly conversation with the actual Polynesian cultures it borrowed from.
The book is the most elaborate of Kirsten’s three published volumes—largest format, most lavish illustration, deepest documentary apparatus.
What’s in it
The book extends and refines the cultural-history framework of The Book of Tiki:
- Documents the Quai Branly exhibition itself. Photographs of the installation, the artifacts on display, the curatorial choices.
- Updates the Polynesian Pop chronology with material recovered since 2000—new figures, recovered ephemera, additional architectural and design history.
- Places American Polynesian Pop in cultural-appropriation context. The Quai Branly framing explicitly named the American aesthetic as a derivative American invention drawing on Polynesian iconography without continuity. The book treats that conversation directly rather than dodging it.
- Photographs. Hundreds, in Taschen production quality. The visual archive deepens what The Book of Tiki established.
Why it matters
Two things, mostly. First, the Quai Branly exhibition was the moment Polynesian Pop officially arrived as a museum-worthy aesthetic. The fact that France’s national indigenous-arts museum hosted the show, with curatorial framing that took the appropriation question seriously rather than ignoring it, signaled the genre’s arrival as a subject of serious scholarship.
Second, the book is the most beautiful single object in the Polynesian Pop bibliography. Where Sippin’ Safari is a working bartender’s reference and The Book of Tiki is a cultural history, Tiki Pop is the coffee-table volume that documents the visual tradition in full Taschen production values. It’s the book you give as a gift.
To go deeper
- Related People Sven Kirsten.
- Companion books The Book of Tiki (2000), Tiki Modern (2007).