Is Moco Museum Serving Up ‘Fast-Food Art’ for the Instagram Era?

This summer, the eminently Instagrammable Modern Contemporary Museum (Moco) opened a new branch in London. With spaces already established in Amsterdam (2016) and Barcelona (2021), its curatorial approach follows a simple formula: poppy, colourful artworks by the likes of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Yayoi Kusama, all presented alongside accessible texts involving prolific use of the word ‘iconic’.

Moco serves up art like fast food with a lurid aesthetic and patronizingly simple descriptions designed to stir the appetite of as large an audience as possible. It isn’t alone in doing so – an increasing number of galleries and dreaded immersive ‘art experiences’ (at the time of writing the highly popular Van Gogh 360-degree digital art show is concurrently running in ten different cities between the US and Europe) are packaging art for quick and easy consumption, valuing spectacle and digestibility over depth. Miami has Superblue, Paris has Atelier des Lumières, even London’s Royal Academy has managed to fit an ‘immersive digital work’ into its Michael Craig-Martin retrospective. With UK museum visitor numbers still yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels, institutions are leaning into engagement strategies that put audience experience – rather than the artwork – first; light rooms, interactive displays and selfie-ready mirror domes have migrated from amusement parks to museums.

This populist approach feels jarring because it runs counter to contemporary art’s perceived modus operandi. The art market derives much of its value from an image of exclusivity and scarcity. We’re used to thinking that art deserves to be placed in rarefied contexts that highlight its significance to society or its place in the art canon. Moco, which places digestibility over relevance, trounces these ideals.

The reality is that an insatiable appetite for ever more ‘content’ is endemic across the art world. While venues like Moco rely on sensory spectacle and enticing marketing campaigns (for those in central London over the summer it was difficult to miss the fleet of branded bubble-gum pink cabs announcing Moco’s launch), commercial galleries take up tactics of their own to compete in the attention economy. Conveyor belt schedules of exhibitions and fairs are pushing ‘hot’ artists for ever more work, while collectors’ inboxes are flooded with discounted offerings of art by lukewarm ones. On both sides of the coin, appetite is essential.

In an industry replete with curators, advisors, consultants and sadly, to a lessening extent, critics, we’ve been fed the delusion that great art is only truly understood by a cadre of tastemakers and the small number of civilians that get it. The reality is that anyone can wrangle something meaningful out of art – provided they put in some work of their own. Technical mastery is easier to discern, but the true meaning of an artist’s work only comes into view with a lot of attention. It might take hours of learning about a painter to get a grip on what they have been trying to do conceptually, but places like Moco seek to lighten the load of such work, encouraging a shallower, more immediate level of engagement.

The same artwork can have very different readings depending on the kind of engagement that the exhibiting institution is trying to encourage. Take Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe portraits, which are on the walls of both Moco and MoMA. When Moco calls them an ‘iconic print of the Hollywood muse,’ they sound like dull marketing fodder. MoMA’s more perceptive but less accessible claim that they ‘reveal her public image as a carefully structured illusion’ makes them feel like an engaging commentary on fame in contemporary society. Furthermore, the walls of Moco are adorned with stencilled quotes from featured artists that vaguely allude to the ‘power of art’, but the focus of these texts seem to be more about the cult of celebrity surrounding these artists than anything else.

Where does this leave us? In a gallery landscape where no artwork’s context is neutral, serving to entice some audiences while alienating others, even obfuscating the significance of the work itself in the process, how should we consume art? We have seen how museum experiences like Moco often engage only with the surface of a work, leading to the misconception that some artworks are resistant to layered interpretation. What, then, should the novice art lover do? Give up on all critical abilities, warped as they can be by varying contexts?

I don’t think so. Our powers of discernment can steer us beyond contextuality, awarding points for how the art itself behaves. What is it trying to say and does it succeed? We should pursue a mixed diet, ignoring trappings of exclusivity or accessibility, depth or shallowness. It’s sad to see great art packaged for mindless consumption or its opposite, placed on a pedestal, shrouded in unnecessarily dense writing. In either case, I think we’d do well to follow our own noses rather than the contextual cues that surround us.

_{Main image: Anthony James, 80″ Great Rhombicosidodecahedron (Solar Black), 2023, detail. Courtesy: © Anthony James Studio}