What is Moco?
Most of London’s art museums have been around for decades, even centuries, so the arrival of a new one is big news. Moco – a three-storey art gallery in Marble Arch housing the private collection of Kim and Lionel Logchies Prins plus some loans – is the latest to open its doors, and the question is: are those doors a portal to art hell, or a pathway to art ecstasy?
The answer to that will depend on who you are, what you like, and your tolerance for portraits of the Queen. Assembled within the building’s freshly painted walls is a collection of some of the most divisive artists of modern times. Banksy, Hirst, Koons, Beeple, Murakami. Combine all that with the Warhols and Basquiats on display, an NFT room and a generic immersive mirror room, and you have a recipe for the poppiest, chintziest, most mainstream art space imaginable.
This is Moco’s third outpost, joining permanent spaces in Amsterdam and Barcelona.
What’s on display?
The opening room is an all-out pop assault: a trio of Jeff Koons works, some Damien Hirst dots, a wall of pretty meh Keith Harings, a not great Yayoi Kusama painting, a tacky, full-size, crystal-studded Porsche by Daniel Arsham and a handful of Warhols. These are some of the most popular, most commercial artists of the past century, all packed relentlessly, unremittingly, eye-poppingly into a single room.
Upstairs, they’ve squeezed a bunch of Banksys in next to a couple of Tracey Emin neons, a huge Murakami alongside a couple of KAWS works, a vast Julian Opie and a giant wall of multi-colour portraits of the Queen by Chris Levine.
Down in the basement you’ll find a room full of screens showing NFTs (including an endless scroll of images by the genre’s biggest star, Beeple), an infinity mirror room almost indistinguishable from all the other infinity mirror rooms, an arcade game, interactive art, a zen garden. It’s all pretty, and pretty meaningless.
Is it any good?
There’s nothing wrong with getting to see some Warhols, Harings and Basquiats; it’s fun, it’s easy, it’s palatable. Those are good things. But there is a lot of very bad stuff here. The wall of Robbie Williams paintings (yes, that Robbie Williams) is heinous, the endless Queen portraits are gross, and the focus on making everything so gruesomely Instagram friendly is so obviously a cynical way to get visitors through the doors that it leaves you feeling queasy.
Especially because going to MOCO is not cheap, it’s a charged entry gallery in a city full of free entry galleries. You want Warhol? You can go to the Tate. You want Hirst? You can go to Newport Street Gallery. You want Banksy? Just go outside, there’s loads of them. You might be saying ‘but the Tate doesn’t have KAWS’. Yeah, there's a reason for that.
This is undeniably populist stuff. It’s precision engineered to appeal to the masses, it’s purpose built for selfies, for social media, for glitz and kudos over artistic depth or value. It’s incredibly friendly and approachable, the wall texts are simple (though still badly written), the fonts are big, the words are small. It’s unintimidating, unpretentious, it will look good on your instagram.
That’s a nice, approachable way to curate, but it’s also deeply cynical and intentionally dumbed down.
But at the same time, so what. Maybe art doesn’t have to be serious and difficult and important and powerful. Maybe art, just sometimes, can be fun and colourful and meaningless. Maybe, between this and Frameless and all the immersive Van Gogh and Klimt crap around, art in London is just entering its lobotomy era.
How to get tickets
Mosey your browser over to the Moco website, where you’ll find tickets ranging in price from £20-24.90. It’s open every day from 9am to 9pm. More details here.