Pop Up: The Aesthetic of Art Museums

I had my first experience with “pop-up” art galleries when I was in college. It was the summer of 2018 and my friends and I decided to go to “Wonderspaces.” After we began to explore the space, it became increasingly evident that this was not the type of museum visit I had expected. There were no regal galleries all hung with oil portraits and lined with wooden benches where visitors could sit and stare at the art or other people. There were no velvet ropes or placards nor the dense atmosphere of reverence that compels one to whisper. At Wonderspaces, it seemed that I was allowed to interact with the installations as much as I wanted. In fact, the pieces seemed to invite observers to become a part of the displays.

Minutes in, my friends and I found ourselves in a hall of mirrors. It was dark, except for the neon lights that stretched into the shadows, and the light that the mirrors reproduced; reflections that became reproductions of reproductions. Likewise, the images of me and my friends went on and on, the copies of our reflections populating the illusory tunnels created by the glass. The armies that we raised, just by being there, were the real intrigue.

“Can someone take a picture of me?” My friend asked.

This question was the continuous refrain of the time we spent there. Each gallery presented a photo-op. There was a circular enclosure with a paper sculpture shaped to look like the underbrush of dense rainforest. Another stark white room had potted plants suspended from the ceiling to look like they were floating in mid-air, just surreal enough to catch your eye. Our favorite was a structure of hundreds of string lights hanging from a metal frame, enclosed on all sides by black curtains, to ensure that there would be no sunlight to overpower the tiny bulbs as they changed from blue to green, to yellow, to pink, to orange, and back again, changing the color of our skin as they went. It was the perfect backdrop. All of the pieces were.

Everyone had a new Facebook profile picture by the following afternoon.

Wonderspaces was the first pop-up museum that I experienced in person, but it was not the first of its kind. Based on the groundswell of nearly-identical photographs that surfaced on Instagram a few years ago, it appears that The Museum of Ice Cream, which has locations in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, set the era of the pop-up museum into motion. The photos, all ice cream-themed, came in slowly, then all at once.

One backdrop, which featured a cascade of fake bananas hanging from invisible strings against a wall colored bright-millennial pink, seemed to have been particularly popular. What struck me was how perfect all those images seemed, the way they created intrigue around their subjects, but never upstaged them.

For a moderate fee, visitors could (and still can) acquire dozens of photos amongst sculptures of larger-than-life confections; their ordinary selves in a veritable pastel wonderland, where everything was pretty, ready-made, and, perhaps most importantly, under control. The exhibit was overwhelmingly successful; tickets sold out months in advance, and lines to get into the galleries wrapped around the block. Everyone wanted to be seen in the Museum of Ice Cream.

One of the main reasons some people create a social media presence is so that they can control the idea of themselves that they reveal to others. Cultivating the images that make up the fabric of that presence (or, in more vernacular terms, cultivating one’s “aesthetic”) is surprisingly hard work. Anyone who worries about creating a digital aesthetic knows the difficulty of finding surroundings that enhance and reinforce the vision of the person that they want their followers to see. Usually, that vision is of someone (real or not) who always looks their best, who stays on-trend, and, notably, who appears in desirable places—places where everyone is going, where the surroundings are eye-catching, but never to the extent that they outshine the main attraction: you.

Therein lies the peculiar allure of the pop-up. It provides a stage for anyone who needs one, mixing the artistic with the trendy, so that all you need to do in order to achieve the vision is open a camera app, hand a phone to a friend, and step inside.

Pop-ups reveal a profound desire to be seen #

But now it’s not just pop-up museums that are using this allure to their advantage. The interiors of public places of leisure (bars, clubs, and theaters, to name a few) are catching on as well. I haven’t been to a bar or club in the past year that didn’t have a wall that served as a stage for photo-ops. Sometimes it’s as simple as a neon sign of a single word or phrase mounted just high enough that an adult of average height can stand beneath it.

Other times, the stage is elaborate, as was the case in one hotel lobby that I was in, where there was a wooden structure built to look like a gazebo that guests could stand under and take photos, to later be posted on their social media profiles and carefully tagged at that specific location.

For better or for worse, all of these stages are a sign of our times, the message of which everyone should take to heart: social media has created a reality in which being seen somewhere desirable is just as important if not more so than actually going to that place. Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether or not we actually enjoyed it, because we as a society now need only for others to believe that our lives are polished, under control, and rich with coveted experiences, if only because their belief will make the vision of ourselves as we wish we could be that much more tangible. In all honesty, I didn’t have much fun at Wonderspaces. But the photos were great, and if anyone were to ask, I could pull them up on my phone and show them how beautiful the space was and how everyone had wanted to see it.

I could prove that I was there.