KAWS Makes Art for the Tech Bro Era

24 hours ago7 min read

Walking through the cavernous, white-walled galleries of SFMOMA, one is immediately struck by the sheer, overwhelming presence of KAWS’s creations—those bulbous, melancholic Companions and the reappropriated, X-eyed cartoon characters that have become the ubiquitous signifiers of a certain kind of contemporary cool. The exhibition, a sprawling survey of his decades-long career, presents itself as a serious retrospective, a legitimizing moment for an artist who began as a graffiti writer.Yet, the entire experience feels less like a critical examination and more like a meticulously curated prelude to a transaction. One can almost hear the quiet, digital chime of a point-of-sale system echoing through the halls.This is art for the Tech Bro Era, a period defined by the seamless, often cynical, fusion of culture and capital, where emotional resonance is secondary to brand equity and the ultimate validation isn't a thoughtful review but a sold-out edition drop. The show could have been a searing indictment of this very phenomenon, a meta-commentary on how art collapses into pure commodity under late capitalism.Instead, it willingly, almost eagerly, succumbs to it. The curation sidesteps any substantive critique of the artist's own role in this system, presenting his commercial collaborations—from Uniqlo to Dior—as neutral milestones rather than the core of his artistic project.There’s a palpable tension here: the museum’s institutional authority is being leveraged not to challenge the viewer but to anoint KAWS’s market dominance, transforming critical space into a high-end showroom. The sculptures, with their polished, vinyl-smooth surfaces and perfectly rendered ennui, are emotionally hollowed out, becoming luxurious signifiers of taste rather than vessels of meaning.They are the perfect artifacts for the new patron class—the venture capitalist, the app founder, the crypto investor—for whom art collecting is another asset class, another form of data to be optimized. The aesthetic is one of accessible profundity; it signals a familiarity with pop culture while maintaining an air of detached, expensive sophistication.It’s art that demands nothing more than recognition and a credit card, a perfect alignment with a worldview that reduces all human experience, from friendship to rebellion, into a scalable, monetizable platform. The exhibition’s most telling moment isn't found in any single artwork, but in its inevitable conclusion: the gravitational pull toward the gift shop, where the entire experience is neatly packaged and commodified. The museum, in this framing, becomes merely the most elegant of marketing funnels, and the art itself just another product in the endless scroll of consumer desire.

#editorial picks news

#KAWS

#SFMOMA

#art exhibition

#contemporary art

#commodification

#culture

#gift shop

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