Two Museums Take on Performative Masculinity, Looksmaxxing, Incels, and Other Macho Buzzwords That Don’t Belong There.

The title is a ploy and the Stedelijk knows it. “Beyond the Manosphere: Masculinities Today” is a clickbait thirst-trap trend-driven symptom of everything wrong with museums entering the attention-economy game. The veneer of urgency and cultural relevance feels forced and already dated. It’s the tweedy teacher saying “No cap” two years too late—while also using it slightly wrong. I believe the kids call this “cringe.” And the institution is aware of this, which is why it quickly attempts to get past its own title. Rein Wolfs and Gianni Jetzer, the twin helms of the Stedelijk and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, where the exhibition will travel at the end of the year, insist that “Rather than reproducing or sensationalizing this phenomenon” of the manosphere, “the exhibition approaches the topic critically and culturally, using it as a point of departure for a wider investigation into how masculinity is constructed, performed, projected, resisted, and undone.” Methinks these directors doth protest too much. They may want to distance themselves from their chosen term, but this framework exploits a cultural logic in which recirculation is monetizable and naming produces both phenomena and their seeming inevitability. Attempting to reap the attentional benefits of the thing you’re critiquing for its attentional pull? Pot, meet kettle. And we haven’t even gotten to the art yet. It’s…fine? Not a whit of it, however, has anything to do with what the opening wall text describes as a “loose network of online spaces where a dominant, misogynistic masculinity is asserted that, to many, feels threatening.” You know: that slurry of pickup artists, black-pill incels, looksmaxxers, peptide-selling biohackers. There are sad lonely digital boys out there, and there is art that grapples with their world: Ryan Trecartin comes to mind. There is also art that, per the directors, “approaches the topic critically and culturally”—think: Hito Steyerl’s 2013 How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File or Ed Fornieles’ 2019 Cel, his performance-installation about online far-right male aggression. But none of that is included here because the manosphere is not of interest to the exhibition beyond its utility as an SEO keyword. Instead, the show treads far more conventional and familiar ground: masculinity as constructed and variable. This is hardly new. See: “Bravehearts: Men in Skirts” at the Met in 2003 or “Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear” at the V&A in 2022. The Barbican featured “Masculinities: Liberation through Photography” in 2020, but 25 years earlier, in 1995, the MIT List Visual Arts Center showed “The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation.” So when “Beyond the Manosphere” asks “What does it mean to be a man today?” it raises the question: did no one involved attend any of those last thirty years of shows? For the conceptual water here is muddied in the sole way it shouldn’t be by now: eliding “being a man” and masculinity. It does not take a doctorate in gender theory to know that the very concept of masculinity as something that can wane or be purchased—the twinned anxiety and hucksterism that fuels the manosphere—shows their absolute difference. This show, then, works off a tired map, and its central themes—Legacy, Violence, Desire, and Norms—traffic in the very conventions it seeks to undo. Curator Melanie Bühler lost me at Serra. Her catalog essay opens with an exhibition origin story in the form of an anecdote about the difficulty she faced at St. Gallen installing exhibitions around Richard Serra’s Thelma, is that you? (For Lena Horne) (1983). Describing it as “a grand, unwieldy piece of art history, too heavy and costly to remove” and “a display of power,” Bühler slides into a theory of masculinity as an entitlement to be imposing: “That which is inevitable is masculine, still.” Really? Still? Paging Beverly Pepper. Louise Bourgeois. Niki de Saint Phalle. But if you come for the king, you best not miss. The Stedelijk’s ostensible counter-legacy to the impositions of male art history include the high-heeled struts of Sylvie Fleury’s video Walking on Carl Andre (1997), which supplants minimalism with hyper-feminized superficiality. Inverting any binary just preserves the binary: this is no post-gender politics. Likewise, it’s not obvious that the massive imitation-gold ruins of John Miller’s Mourning for a World of Rubbish (2020) or Eduardo Paolozzi’s twisting Neo-Saxeiraz (1966) are any less space-consuming than the Serra: they’re just less abstract and lack his radicality. Serra’s materials may be macho in scale, but his forms activate the fragility and vulnerability of the body, an experiential lightness of being that undercuts any simplistic description of his work as “phallic.” The most compelling piece in the “Legacy” section is If It Moves Kiss It (2002), Lucy McKenzie’s wall-covering mural reproducing a desecrated municipal painting that appears in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Stylized neoclassical bodies of laboring men in loincloths are graffitied with speech—“Suck it and see,” “Ouch hurts great”—alongside lolling tongues and dicks. Context changes everything: what appears in the film as antisocial iconoclasm here declaims a cartoonish homoeroticism that undercuts the solemnity of straight virility. So much for “Legacy”; elsewhere, the category distinctions mean little. The works classed under “Violence” and those under “Desire” could be swapped without anyone noticing. Sophie Calle’s Young Girl’s Dream (1992) traffics in the tension between desires felt and desires imputed, but is filed under “Violence.” Diamond Stingily’s Orgasms Happened Here (Hot Girl) (2024), a quickly-digested literalism consisting of a closet of men’s shirts in front of pictures of half-naked women, appears under “Desire,” though its placard writes about exploitation. “Desire” also includes Hans Eijkelboom’s studies of “the ideal man”—though its taxonomy is perfect for “Norm.” (Hal Fischer’s “Gay Semiotics” would have been the better inclusion anyway—nothing transforms masculinity like men in leather chaps. There is, in general, far too little queer and transmasc culture in the show. I kept looking for Harry Dodge, for Cassils, for Del LaGrace Volcano…) The most interesting room is the one viewers are apt to spend the least time in. It comprises three unrelated works in a space bathed in electric yellow light. P. Staff’s Afferent Nerves (2023) consists of an overhead net connected to the building’s electricity, which produces a crackling, dreadful soundscape. In the center, a neon-green dystopic terrarium contains the tiny figurines of Tetsumi Kudo’s Cultivation by Radio-activity in the Electronic Circuit (1968). Though the exhibition highlights his “philosophy of impotence,” Kudo’s post-war call to dissolve dominance was really a futuristic eco-politics—not imagining life after men but after the human. Elsewhere, a monitor shows Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy’s Family Tyrant (Modeling and Molding) / Cultural Soup (1987), in which they play a father and a son in gloriously grotesque states of masturbatory, goo-covered rage. The show ought to have leaned into that aesthetic of the unnerving, presenting more like Sam Durant’s photographs of wax colonial figures, which register the uncanny kitsch of national lore. One likewise wishes that more than one piece had been included by the Dutch folk artist known as Melle, whose Boschian Tuin met Granaatappel (1975) features an isolated self-pleasuring cock, its shaft a broken spine, longingly taking in the spilling seeds of a pomegranate. All genitalia, regarded closely, is bizarre. If we’re going to get into masculinity by way of the strangeness of organs, then where is Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle? A better title would have been Make Masculinity Weird Again. We can try. Walk out of the Stedelijk and travel an hour south to the imposing Noordbrabants Museum in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Its current show “Am I Masculine? Fashion, Art, and Photography” has problems, but also great promise. For one, as if answering the Stedelijk’s deficient interest in its own conceit, the Brabantish rooms are full of large vertical screens looping TikTok playlists: casual misogyny; earnest protein bros; #powerdressing girls. This omnipresent digital milieu is the counterpoint for the show’s focus on the materiality of masculinity: armor and Gucci hats, but also drag fashion from Khareem Wielingen and the feminist-quote-bearing tote bag of the “performative male.” As masculinity is loosed from men, lines of connection become possible: from Greek ideals to gym selfies, from suits to the structured tailoring of the 1940s woman. The signifiers of masculinity travel and this show makes room for straps and packers and the beings who might bear them. There are missteps: an eye-rolling display of paper tears on which viewers are exhorted to record vulnerabilities. But one forgives this amidst delights such as Jason Swinehammer’s pink and blue crocheted Magenta Ice Jockstrap (2021–22), which merges fetish eroticism with the cuddly aesthetics of the cute. SweetMeat, a 2025 film by Bart Hess, is the standout—my favorite work across both exhibitions. On a spare gray platform in a spare gray room, two men face each other in the crouched tension of a wrestling stance. Each is covered in one hundred translucent candies: one set blue, one orange. They engage in a visceral, intimate fight to eat the gummies off the other’s body, blurring the homosocialism of regulated masculine competition and an unregulatable switch homoeroticism. It’s the desire for dominance and dominance of desire, but candy makes it play. Aggressive, but sweet. The Noordbrabants show has no exhibition catalog. Its title sounds like it is ripped from a 1980s afterschool special. But its willingness to treat masculinity as generously as possible, as plural styles of being, gets far closer to the aims of the Stedelijk, whose desperation to be topical ironically keeps cliché alive. I want Richard Serra and crocheted jockstraps both. Wasn’t that the point of this critique in the first place?