I'll Meet You There:
Radical Hospitality as a Way to New Audiences
Revised arts & culture article, originally published on Stilllife, September 2024
As the sun gives way to dusk over Long Island City, hundreds pile into the courtyard of MoMA PS1, after having an after-hours look at the annual exhibition. Exiting the creaky halls of the formerly abandoned school, they pick up their drinks, step on the gravel and gather around the DJ. They form quite the unexpected crowd: finance bros, your usual art world lovers, a kid in a stroller and a singular attendee in a neck brace.
While contemporary art provides the backdrop, attendees are there for something less tangible. The people are drinking, talking, dancing and becoming part of the atmosphere. MoMA PS1 has long positioned itself as a place for experimentation and Warm Up extends that spirit beyond the artwork itself. For a few hours, the usual rules of museum behavior are suspended. Introspective silence gives way to bass-heavy music and collective dancing. Victor Turner describes the bond that emerges when people step outside ordinary social structures as communitas. Traditional rituals have long created these kinds of moments, but in contemporary life they can also appear in voluntary spaces of leisure, where people get to experiment with being together differently. Warm Up changes the way people gather around art, and with it, how they experience it.
The image of the art world as inaccessible and self-serious is there for a reason, but it obscures how social cultural life has always been. Travel 2000 years back to Ancient Greece and we may catch a glimpse of Socrates, reclined on a banqueting couch, wine in hand, engaged in fierce debates about topics ranging from love and beauty to justice. Centuries later, salons hosted by the architects of the Harlem Renaissance served as a gathering space where figures like Langston Hughes shared their words and performed their art amidst tunes of Jazz, envisioning a world where Black voices prevailed in the cultural conversation. What’s being rethought now is who gets to enter these spaces and who gets to feel welcomed enough to stay.
There are cultural spaces that treat art as something to gather around, a starting point for conversation and something that can organize social life. Creative Time, for example, has long brought artists and attendees together around social and political questions, while Performance Space New York has built its programming around finding “hope, resistance, and common-ground in diaspora, education, conversation, partying, and shared communal space.”
If hospitality begins with the invitation, then for institutions looking to reach new audiences, the question becomes how to invite someone into a cultural space when they don’t already see themselves as part of it. Radical hospitality gives us one way to think about that invitation. It shifts attention from what an institution displays to how people encounter it and to the expectations they bring with them before they walk through the door.
MoMA PS1 Warm Up 1998. Image courtesy of MoMA PS1.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden takes this invitation into a modern medium. In 2023, Director Melissa Chiu, a proponent of “radical accessibility”, partnered with MTV to produce The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, a reality competition in which seven artists each created original artworks before a panel of judges. The contestants were tasked with responding to topics relevant to the cultural zeitgeist. The format tapped into a familiar appetite for behind-the-scenes access and watching creative judgement unfold. MTV was an apt partner. From Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes to RuPaul’s Drag Race, the channel has a history of making creative subcultures part of popular entertainment. In borrowing from reality TV, the Hirshhorn created a familiar entry point, but adopting a format also means deciding which of its conventions to embrace, from the dramatic personalities and competition to judgment and stakes. At the end, the winning artist, Baseera Khan, received an exhibition at the Museum and a $100,000 cash prize.
Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu with select artists during filming, Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Photo Shannon Finney
Museums have similarly found new ways to give audiences an entry point into the institution through their digital platforms. The Museum of Modern Art uses its website and social channel to provide accessible introductions to art history and terminology, while institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have brought audiences behind the scenes to see how some of their most prized artworks are conserved. The content ranges from surprising stories to artworks framed through the lens of modern life, meeting people where their attention already is. In a TikTok, MoMA introduced René Magritte’s The Lovers (1928) with “Is this the original situationship,” a question pulled straight from contemporary dating culture, creating a point of recognition before asking the viewer to know anything about Magritte.
Even when these approaches are strategies for reaching new audiences, they can expand what an institution makes possible and what people imagine a cultural space and be for. Hospitality begins before arrival. It starts with the story people have been told about a place and whether it makes them want to enter. That story shapes what people imagine they might find once they walk through the door, and eventually what they understand the space to be for.