Two museum stories this week sit next to each other and demand a conversation. SFMOMA is hosting its first fashion exhibition in 40 years, and Dolly Parton is gearing up to launch a new museum. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Latino is still searching for a physical home, a different kind of institution-building problem. All three stories involve the same question: what is the cultural institution for, and who gets to have one?
Fashion in the Museum, Pop Stars as Curators
SFMOMA's return to fashion after four decades reads as both a capitulation and a correction. Fashion has, in the intervening years, become one of the most theoretically rich and commercially powerful forms of contemporary culture. Holding it at arm's length was a curatorial posture, not an aesthetic judgment. Dolly Parton's museum is a different animal. It is a pop star institutionalizing her own mythology, which is what the Smithsonian does on a national scale and what every museum founder has done since the Medicis. The difference is transparency. Parton has never pretended the myth isn't the product. Meanwhile, UK museum workers are striking across the sector over wages that haven't kept pace with the cultural prestige their labor maintains. The institution and the brand are diverging at the seam.
The Performance Marathon and the Institutional Frame
At MoMA, Brooklyn's Pageant Space has been running a performance marathon where no one, including the organizers, knows what anyone will do before they enter the room. 'We never develop the work,' they say. This is the anti-institutional institution: MoMA's frame giving oxygen to radical indeterminacy. It is the exact inverse of Dolly's museum, which will be maximally curated, maximally intentional, and probably maximally attended. Both are valid. Both are museums. The question David Senior and the SFMOMA library have been sitting with, on what the institution owes the archive and the public, is what connects all of them: who holds the keys, and what happens when the building hasn't been built yet.