The Collection That Crowded

In Chloe Veltman’s October 7 NPR report from RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me, visitors Joi Karra and Bre Walker connect the carvings to RM’s habit of making seven snow ducks. That is their interpretation, not an established explanation of the anonymous Korean artist’s work. But it reveals what they brought through the museum door: a shared language for beginning to look.

Walker tells NPR this is her first visit to an art museum. Karra has visited SFMOMA many times. They arrived through the same fandom, not from the same relationship to art. Already, the convenient category “celebrity audience” is doing less explanatory work than it thinks.

Permission to look

Veltman reports that the exhibition contains more than 170 works, mostly from RM’s collection, with additions from SFMOMA’s holdings. The BTS leader worked with two museum curators. Among the pairings is a painting by Korean artist Yun Hyong-keun alongside one by Mark Rothko.

The first preview day sold out. The museum’s retail director told NPR it had front-loaded more inventory than for any previous exhibition. Attention has a commercial itinerary ready for it. There will be souvenirs.

There is also something less easily stocked. Walker says she had assumed that responding to art required some prior knowledge. After the visit, she thinks she could get something out of museums and says she will return.

That is one visitor’s account, not evidence of a lasting transformation in museum participation. Yet the barrier she describes matters. A door can be open while someone believes the room requires a version of themselves they have not qualified to become.

Fandom offered Walker a reason to enter before she had settled that question. It did not supply an art-history credential. It made the credential feel less necessary.

The snob’s response would be that she came for the wrong reason. An interesting position for anyone supposedly worried that people do not visit museums.

Beyond the introduction

Celebrity supplies an invitation and a frame. The frame can also become a limit.

Karra and Walker tell NPR they want to understand why RM treasures these works. That curiosity is real. It also places the collector between viewer and object: what does this painting tell us about him? Seven ducks can become seven band members before the viewer has asked much about the person who carved them.

This is not a diagnosis of fans. It is a familiar temptation whenever we approach unfamiliar work through someone we already admire. We can let the introduction become the entire conversation.

The report contains a useful interruption. Wonwoo Lee’s engraved rock leaves both visitors baffled. It appears in a section titled “I don’t know … but I like it.” The work has not become legible just because the collector is beloved. There is still something to encounter that does not immediately confirm what they know.

Elsewhere, another visitor offers handmade fabric bookmarks. NPR describes fans stopping to talk and exchange their own artworks, slowing progress through already crowded galleries. The audience is not merely receiving culture. People are making things and giving them away.

Coherenceism’s invitation to widen the circle becomes concrete here: let newcomers enter as people capable of responding, not merely as a market delivered by a famous name. That means valuing their questions and creations while leaving room for the exhibited artists to be more than clues to the collector.

A crowded gallery needs space to linger as well as reasons to arrive. Veltman’s feature cannot tell us whether this exhibition will create enduring museum habits. It does show a first-time visitor reconsidering what she is allowed to enjoy.

Come because someone you admire invited you. Stay long enough to find something they cannot interpret for you.