Pace Gallery recently launched a series of exhibitions across its Chelsea spaces in New York, and naturally posted to Instagram about it. On view is Chuck Close’s On Paper alongside a programme of events tied to Emmet Gowin’s Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966–1994 and Sam Gilliam’s STITCHED. All three opened within days of each other and run concurrently through late April, forming a neat snapshot of postwar and contemporary American art: portraiture, photography, and abstraction. Cool. I guess.
On paper (no pun intended) and on the press release, it’s clean: a model of curatorial clarity. Close’s meticulous, gridded faces; Gowin’s quietly observational photographs; Gilliam’s unstretched, exuberant canvases pushing painting into space. A blue-chip trifecta, staged with the confidence of a gallery that has been doing this for decades.
Enter me, doomscrolling on Insta. Beyond the predictable mix of installation shots and polite applause emojis, one comment was particularly charismatic and downright blogworthy:
“Sex pest show while a sex pervert president carries out a hitlerian blitzkrieg on a people whose skin colour is different from his. These mega galleries really are disgusting right now. …”
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Lunatic keyboard warrior. But hear me out — OP makes a good point.
First of all, the phrase “sex pest show” gravitates, quite specifically, toward one person. Of the three artists on view, Close is the one, the only one, whose legacy has been publicly complicated by allegations of sexual harassment. But even more than that, the comment really picks up on a fault line that institutions have still not quite resolved: what to do with artists (or gallery directors for that matter) whose work remains canonised by their me-too missteps?
Second of all, the comment doesn’t linger too long at me-too, as it quickly accelerates into a laundry list of criticisms: Donald Trump, the “war”, and then race, before finally landing on “mega galleries” as the site where all of these issues converge. While they are all valid in their own right, what the author’s comment stages — perhaps unintentionally — is a kind of totalising critique, where everything folds into everything else.
Is it a stretch? Sure. The distance between a Chelsea exhibition and geopolitical violence is not exactly short. There is a fair amount of projection involved in bundling together #MeToo, contemporary warfare, and the economics of the art market into one sweeping condemnation. The risk is that, in making everything connected, important distinctions start to dissolve. And yet, it’s not entirely disconnected either. The gallery isn’t just a gallery, it’s a bluechip gallery; a symbol of wealth, power, and insulation. The artist isn’t just an artist; he is a node in a wider network of cultural authority.
Mega galleries like Pace Gallery operate in a space where culture, capital, and soft power converge. Sure, they don’t exactly set foreign policy, but they do participate in shaping the symbolic order: what is seen, valued, remembered. Their exhibitions are not neutral displays of aesthetic objects; they are acts of framing. To exhibit Chuck Close today is categorically not the same as exhibiting him twenty years ago. The work hasn’t changed, but the conditions around it very much have. The question is no longer just whether the work deserves to be seen, but what it means to show it — and how that meaning is managed.
Historically, the art world has often claimed a kind of exceptionalist belief that aesthetic space somehow remains insulated from the messiness of politics. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is frequently cited as a counterexample: a painting that directly confronted the violence of the Spanish Civil War. But even Guernica circulated within institutional frameworks — museums, exhibitions, diplomatic contexts — that shaped how its politics were received. Even if the piece spoke for itself, the system around it had its own story to tell.
Meanwhile, the protests against the Sackler family’s sponsorship of museums exposed how cultural prestige functions as a form of reputational laundering. It seemed like, finally, artists and activists challenged institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate, forcing them to take accountability for their funding sources. The result was not just the removal of names from walls, but a palpable, albeit small, shift in what is (publicly) permissible.
But those are museums, and this is a gallery. Not only is it more private, it is more autonomous. Also, blue-chip galleries are exceptionally skilled at managing discomfort. Wall texts are measured, press releases are polished, and controversy is absorbed into neutral language via crisis management specialists instead of art historians. Difficult contexts are acknowledged only indirectly — or not at all — and the result is a version of art that appears detached from the conditions and stakes that surround it.
The art world does not exist in a vacuum, even if it often performs as though it does. Its authority depends on networks of patronage, audience reception, historical precedent, and symbolic hierarchies. What is displayed, what is foregrounded, and what is quietly archived (or ignored) is not without consequence. The cycles of outrage, admiration, scandal, and applause are part of the same ecosystem, where remaining alert to the interconnections between culture, politics, and power is the only way to preserve perspective.
Critique comes in waves, surfacing over one scandal only to return with the next, often circling back to questions that were conveniently ignored before. The news cycle works the same way — stories chasing stories, Wag-the-Dogging us from one spectacle to the next. In that context, a totalising Instagram rant can do important work: it refuses to let the connections vanish, insisting that we see how everything — art, power, politics, commerce — circulates together. The comment reminds us that art, however polished or decorous, still has the power to unsettle, to accuse, to illuminate the invisible hierarchies shaping not just taste, but perception itself. In a world eager for tidy narratives and “ends” to wars, refusing that is not just provocative, it’s necessary.
