OLD NEWS

MUSEUMS NO LONGER AFRAID OF ‘SELLING OUT’.HAVE THEY FORGOTTEN ABOUT THE ART? by Julia Halperin
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It’s impossible to miss. Overlooking a highway that connects Miami Beach to downtown Miami is a 1,800-square-foot digital billboard. With a larger footprint than a typical two-bedroom apartment, the screen advertises brands like Yves Saint Laurent and Tiffany & Co. Some passers-by might be surprised to learn the identity of its owner: the neighbouring modern and contemporary art museum, the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
The billboard, which is estimated to generate at least $1.2mn each year for PAMM’s operations, is indicative of a broader change under way at American museums. As they face mounting financial challenges, many art institutions are becoming increasingly entrepreneurial, experimenting with everything from art sales to tech innovation to real estate development.
“The typical store and café lose money for museums,” says Stephen Reily, the director of Remuseum, a think-tank housed by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art that promotes innovation in art institutions. He notes that US institutions often focus on the revenue such businesses generate without examining the high cost of operating and staffing them. “It serves them better to consider the kinds of businesses they could operate profitably.”
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Some advocates say they have no choice but to experiment. Historically, museums have relied largely on donations from businesses, individuals, and government. Earned income accounts for, on average, less than a third of US museum revenue overall. Today, attendance remains lower than it was before the pandemic. Meanwhile, corporate sponsorship is dwindling, public arts funding under the Trump Administration has dropped, and a generation of donors that museums relied on for decades is ageing out.
To fill the gap, museums are looking to convert the expertise and assets they already have into sustainable income. In 2022, the Museum of Modern Art in New York began commissioning NFTs and digital art, taking up to a 20 per cent cut of every purchase made on the blockchain and up to 5 per cent on resales. That same year, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe patented a high-tech crate designed to better protect artworks in transit; it intends to license the technology to other businesses and non-profits in the future.
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For old-school museum leaders, these kinds of moneymaking initiatives can provoke a knee-jerk shudder. Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, initially felt uneasy about partnering with the company Avant Arte to produce and sell prints for €6,000 each because such commercialisation might “lessen an artist’s work”. Once she saw the quality of the prints, however, her fears dissipated. Since 2024, Dia has generated more than $5mn from editions by George Condo and Lee Ufan, with another due to launch in January. The foundation also recently entered into a three-year agreement to advise Netflix founder Reed Hastings on a public art park in Utah in exchange for an undisclosed fee.
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“Every organisation is having this conversation right now, given the lack of certainty around federal funding,” says William Cary, the chief operating officer of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The Barnes has increased its earned revenue from $6mn in 2022 (20 per cent of its operating budget) to $8.1mn in 2025 (28 per cent of its operating budget). Its initiatives include consulting work for other organisations like the Museum Store Association; licensing its Visual Experience Platform, an online learning tool that allows students to zoom in on objects during a class; and taking on administrative tasks for two neighbouring institutions — Calder Gardens and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage — through operating partnerships.
There is a danger of pushing this kind of entrepreneurial thinking too far, warns Natasha Degen, chair of art market studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Under US law, nonprofits must pay additional taxes on revenue from any business deemed unrelated to their missions. Problems can arise when activities are “far outside the core competency of museums” and “direct resources away from the core mission”, Degen says.
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PAMM’s mammoth billboard has sparked two lawsuits and put it at odds with some of its neighbours. In September, the museum agreed to pay a $500,000 annual fee to the city and limit the billboard’s operating hours as part of a settlement. The following month, the neighbouring Frost Museum of Science sued the Florida Department of Transportation, arguing that PAMM’s digital sign violates state law, advertises products unrelated to its business, and contributes to light pollution in the area. Frost Science’s CEO Douglas Roberts says his institution declined a similar billboard proposal; he considers hosting liquor, car and luxury ads “inconsistent with the mission of an art or science museum”. A spokesperson for PAMM notes that the billboard was “meticulously reviewed” by all relevant authorities and fully complied with state and local regulations.
Some entrepreneurial schemes don’t outlast the leaders who conceived them. Under its former director Hesse McGraw, the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston began offering “curatorial services” in 2020 to organisations across the US that sought to integrate public art into their facilities, with clients as far-flung as the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and a water recycling facility in California. Moving forward, CAMH plans to prioritise projects closer to home. “These are good initiatives to explore in an effort to diversify revenue, but utilising existing museum resources to support these endeavours can create real challenges to sustaining and growing them long-term,” says Melissa Luján, who took over as CAMH’s chief operating officer and co-director last year.
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Efforts to make museums more self-sustaining are not new. In 1979, after its endowment contracted, MoMA sold the air rights above its museum for $17mn, clearing the way for the construction of a luxury residential tower next door. “In the years that followed, lots of New York City institutions copied them,” Degen says. MoMA also operated an art advisory service for corporations until 1996.
But several factors make this current moment distinct, experts say. First, the cost of operating a museum — from shipping to staffing to insurance — has never been higher, according to several museum leaders. Second, a new generation is more comfortable than its predecessors with blurred lines between the non-profit and the commercial spheres. “That’s a generational shift that goes beyond the art world,” Degen says. “The whole idea of ‘selling out’ is no longer a thing.” Third, the public perception of museum philanthropy as purely altruistic has changed amid the growing backlash to donors such as BP and the Sackler family, as well as recent scrutiny of the role that commercial galleries play in supporting museum exhibitions of the artists they represent.
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“Which is more nefarious?” asks Pete Scantland, the chair of the board at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio and the founder of Orange Barrel Media, the company that operates the billboard on PAMM’s property. “A programme that is dictated by galleries and collectors who can fund only the most prominent artists, or a museum that has creative freedom because they’ve developed a business model that allows them to support it independently?” Orange Barrel Media is developing similar billboard projects for approximately 10 other high-profile art institutions across the US.
Speaking before Frost Science filed its lawsuit, PAMM’s director Franklin Sirmans said that he couldn’t “overstate” the importance of the institution’s new revenue stream “as we confront the challenges that most museums are confronting in this moment”. In addition to hosting ads, he noted, the billboard also promotes the museum’s activities and hosts art commissions. He considers this marketing — which takes up around 20 per cent of the screen’s allotted time — as important as the revenue generated by advertisers.
The rise of entrepreneurship in American museums stands in contrast with the state of play in the UK, where institutions are increasingly reliant on private donors. Still, it’s not out of the question that the likes of Tate and the National Portrait Gallery could host a giant billboard or spin off a consultancy business in the years to come. As Degen says, the US is often “a window into the future for museums”. _FinancialTimes

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‪PAUL EVANS WINTER SOLSTICE (2022)
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KAWS MAKES ART FOR THE TECH BRO ERA
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An inflatable giant with a cartoonish skull-and-crossbones head perches on the roof of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, like a car-lot tube man, advertising the exhibition KAWS: Family inside. The big balloon is various shades of gray, reminiscent of another large sculpture just a few blocks away on the Embarcadero Plaza, a 40-foot-tall naked woman fabricated from steel mesh. Originally produced for Burning Man, “R-Evolution” is one of 100 sculptures in the Big Art Loop, a city-wide public art initiative privately funded by a tech billionaire. Beyond their shared vapid aesthetics, both KAWS and the Big Art Loop signal the rapid move toward the privatization of culture, and its parallel degradation, in San Francisco and beyond.
KAWS is the pseudonym of American artist Brian Donnelly. He got his start in the 1990s New York City graffiti scene, altering bus stop advertisements with his signature skull and crossbones and throwing up his eponymous tag. Early on, Donnelly seems to have figured out that marketing is the key to success. He quickly parlayed his iconic characters into branding for dozens of merch deals with fashion labels and toy companies. Only relatively recently has he been inducted into the art world. Now, the KAWS project has come to be defined by its ubiquity, pervading the market from $20 t-shirts to $14-million paintings.
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KAWS: Family, which originated at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2023, is a small survey exhibition of Donnelly’s work, including a handful of large-scale sculptures, paintings, drawings, and merchandise from various brand partnerships, such as Nike, MTV, and General Mills. The wall text fails to mention a trip Donnelly made to San Francisco in 1995, where he met fellow street artist Barry McGee, whose own tagging on bus stop ads inspired Donnelly to bring the practice back to the East Coast. It’s a missed opportunity for SFMOMA to call out a local connection, but the anecdote itself highlights the way KAWS exists without a strong sense of place. That’s by design. The work severs its connection to any signifiers of a specific locale or identity in service of commercial omnipotence. A KAWS object can be whatever you want it to be — except fine art.
Donnelly’s brand identity revolves around his signature characters, which have benign and friendly names like “Companion” and “Chum,” or the slightly more conspiratorial moniker “Accomplice.” They all possess a uniform look: a skull-and-crossbones head with X’d out eyes, plopped on the body of Mickey Mouse, the Michelin Man, Boba Fett, Muppets, or various Simpsons characters. KAWS: Family shares its name with a 2021 sculpture featuring an ensemble of five characters that greets visitors at the beginning of the exhibition. The rest is a variation on the theme, from towering bronze-cast sculptures, patinated to look like plastic, to pen drawings and acrylic paintings.
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The show never deepens beyond the merchandizing appeal of repackaging familiar forms. Are we supposed to be excited by the juxtaposition of sneakers and paintings, whose joint presentation tells us only that KAWS has beaten the system by having it both ways? Family’s emphasis on these corporate partnerships suggests that something doesn’t need to have the presumed integrity of fine art to be museum worthy as long as it succeeds as an art-adjacent product. And the product itself is all pastiche, an orgy of postmodern signifiers, potentially charming because of our familiarity with these characters, but devoid of any real commentary on pop culture or capitalism.
Donnelly himself has admitted that the work he does now has “pretty much nothing to do with graffiti,” citing his engagement with high-end streetwear companies — and he clearly leans into this lineage of commercialism here. In one series that riffs on The Simpsons, titled Kimpsons, the paintings are presented not in frames, but rather plastic blister packs, like action figures for sale at Walmart. Another gallery is lined with cereal boxes that he designed for General Mills in 2022. It’s impossible to see them and not be reminded of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes — but where Warhol was critiquing mass production, Donnelly was actively participating. A white gold and diamond-encrusted necklace commissioned by rapper Kid Cudi bears a striking resemblance to Damien Hirst’s “For the Love of God.” <https://tinyurl.com/yehbeupx> The similarity brought to mind Hirst’s comment, in a 2007 interview with BBC One, that “as an artist you always make work from what’s around you, and money was around me.”
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The show represents of a decline in aesthetics infecting the fine arts in San Francisco and elsewhere under the rise of “red-chip” art — essentially, work that appeals to tech and finance bros in its kitschy, apparently harmless aesthetics and role in the market as a status symbol and pump-and-dump stock, an asset with an artificially inflated value — in this case, the perception that these objects are sound art investments. Other artists who cater to this movement include a roster of white dudes like Beeple, Alex Israel, and Alec Monopoly, all genuflecting at the altar of Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami. While the originators of the movement still worked within traditional gallery systems, the new guard has largely skirted the white-cube art world in favor of other lucrative avenues. At least until now. KAWS: Family fails to take any sort of interrogative position, simply treating KAWS as a fact of contemporary fine art.
That’s because the decision makers at the museum know they don’t have to try. The show is bound to be wildly popular; the line on opening day already stretched around the block as I left the press preview. Adult tickets clock in at $42, though a visit to the gift shop, which, in typical KAWS fashion, occupies the last gallery in the exhibition, is clearly part of the intended experience.“Why” isn’t a relevant question when money talks louder.
This institutional capitulation to the market forces driving the techno gilded age is disappointing in the least, dangerous at worst. We’re left only to surmise that good art is a liability in a world driven by capitalism. Instead, we get the benign, vacant monument to commerce that is KAWS — so palatable that it’s sickening.
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OLEG MOLCHANOV “THE BREATH OF SPRING - SOLSTICE” 2012
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THOUGHTS ON A YEAR OF TRACKING THE TOP ‘MUSEUM ARTISTS’ by Ben Davis
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I’ve spent a lot of time this year combing through museum websites and exhibition rosters to see which artists are showing. Doing this exercise, you do see ups and downs, as different constellations of shows open and close: artists having a “micro-moment.” But a takeaway for me is that the artists most favored by curators, the ones experiencing a Major Museum Moment, haven’t changed too much throughout 2025.
Many of the names near the top of my Museum Artist count in December—Marie Watt, Jeffrey Gibson, Rose B. Simpson—have been in the mix all year. Whatever else changes in the museum world, their influence will certainly carry into 2026, given the large number of shows they are in that extend into into the new year.
As always, there is a steep fall off from the top ranks. A narrow band of stars feature in a lot of shows, followed by a long tail of artists with much more limited visibility. Only slightly more than 200 artists are simultaneously in three or more shows in December, and only a little under 400 are in two or more.
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Just below the top 15 Museum Artists in my December 2025 tally, the next most visible artists (by my way of counting it) would be Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Virgil Ortiz, Cara Romero, and Jean Shin.
Below that, you have names like Anila Quayyum Agha, Sheila Hicks, Suzanne Jackson, Isaac Julien, Alex Katz, KAWS, Joyce Kozloff, Lorna Simpson, Joan Semmel, Amy Sherald, and Tavares Strachan.
And a step lower down still, this month, are Andrea Carlson, Petah Coyne, Nicholas Galanin, Theaster Gates, David Hammons, Lisa Jarrett, Danny Lyon, Martin Puryear, Deborah Roberts, and Stephanie Syjuco.
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In this wider pool, you can see a cluster of white female artists who got their start professionally 40 to 50 years ago: Coyne, whose flamboyantly feminine installations are now at the Akron Art Museum and the Lowe in Miami; Hicks, whose spectacular textiles are at SFMOMA; Kozloff, whose Pattern and Decoration painting is celebrated at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York; and Semmel, whose lucidly self-scrutinizing paintings are honored at the Jewish Museum in New York.
But as has been the case all year, the most widely shown figures are Black and Indigenous artists. Thematically, almost all the top artists make work explicitly about the history of racism and colonialism or the celebration of cultural identity. Anyone in the top ranks who is younger—meaning under the age of 70(!)—is a person of color (with the singular exception of KAWS). This has been true for all of 2025.
Some of these figures get a boost in my tally from institutions founded as a home for minority artists, like the newly reopened Studio Museum. Five of the most visible artists are featured in its opening show: Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, and Glenn Ligon. Many others have been kept in the conversation in 2025 via touring shows like “Indigenous Identities” at the Zimmerli Museum in New Brunswick, New Jersey, organized by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who died in January after a storied history as an artist and advocate. Five of the Indigenous artists on my December Museum Artists list are in that show: Watt, Gibson, Simpson, Raven Halfmoon, and Wendy Red Star.
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Quite a few of these top figures overlap in the same private collections—the Jordan D. Schnitzer Famly Foundation, the Gutierrez Collection, the Ann and Mel Schaffer Collection, the Making Their Mark Foundation (formerly the Shah Garg Collection). These organizations have explicitly set out to redefine the art conversation by touring their holdings, evidently with some success.
Going into 2026, art continues to be under concerted political fire from the Trump administration over “D.E.I.” The emphasis on racial reckoning as the central U.S. museum theme is noteworthy, at a time when most art institutions don’t feel exactly outspoken (as my colleague Helen Stoilas noted recently, few major art institutions took up the recent Fall of Freedom protest against authoritarianism). Yet at the same time, it must be said that the range of interests of museums feels narrow.
The largest demographic minority in the United States remains Hispanic/Latino, accounting for a fifth of the U.S. population and central to politics in 2025, given the current administration’s furious attacks on immigrants from Latin America. Yet strikingly few artists with this background had major museum traction in 2025, with Dominican-born Firelei Báez being the clearest exception I can see. Indeed, which exact term to use seems confusingly up in the air in the cultural conversation, with government institutions pointedly using “Latino,” many major museums holding onto “Latinx” or sometimes “Latino/a/x”—but now sometimes shifting towards “Latine,” deemed to be less ungainly and/or less controversial.
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Nor are Asian and Asian American artists particularly visible. The 96-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is in the top tier for December, but that seems to have little to do with her background or decades of artistic experimentation. Rather, museums in Texas and Buffalo are chasing the Insta trendiness of her mirrored environments.
The alienation of younger white men from liberal cultural institutions briefly became a topic of debate following the 2024 election. If you were a young white male artist scanning museum programming in 2025, it would be unclear what kind of art practice you might pursue if you wanted its attention. The photojournalist Danny Lyon makes my long list, above. But he is in his 80s, and his visibility is tied to his photos of Haiti from 40 years ago, now on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.
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In terms of mediums, the ones favored throughout 2025 were conceptually infused photography, textile-based installation, and ceramic sculpture. One of things you see, sifting through a lot of U.S. museum exhibition programs, is how many exhibitions of contemporary art ceramics there are. I focus on living artists in these lists, but it’s worth noting here that one of the most-shown figures right now is late ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011). She has simultaneous solo shows at the Chazen Museum in Madison, Wisconsin, and the Noguchi Museum in Queens, plus a tribute to her wide-ranging influence at the Princeton University Art Museum, and a volley of group show appearances.
Museums programs are planned years in advance. The current state of things is the result of trends that began accumulating a decade ago. But are there other trends I noticed that suggest rising themes and media?
Observers have been talking about tech-art as a very logical pivot. Museums are desperate for young, plugged-in audiences and a new layer of patrons who see tech as clout. But the exact discourse that would make the pivot possible remains unclear. Is there a hint of a hybrid between the current vibe, focused on craft and critique, and a new vibe, focused on futurism and freakiness, in something like Kara Walker‘s animatronic environment, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), which continues to engage crowds at SFMOMA? Possibly.
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Meanwhile, at Art Basel Miami Beach this month, the artwork that drew buzz was Regular Animals by Beeple, the online sensation who has poured his windfall from the NFT bubble into creepy robotics. Of course, the art-fair world very much has its own dynamics—in fact, my whole Museum Artist project began because I was thinking about alternative, non-market measures of success. But if you are hunting for bottom-up signals from my many hours of looking at exhibition lists, I’ll note that the year began with the Gibbes Museum in Beeple’s native South Carolina featuring two of his interactive A.I.-based video-cube sculptures. Then the Shed in New York featured one this fall. And the year ends with two large museums, the Toledo Museum of Art and LACMA, simultaneously spotlighting his A.I. art. It’s not enough to say he’s a real Museum Artist now, but certainly enough to say that something is up. _artnet