Opening party at MoMA for the exhibition. Please subscribe to support the channel.
Artist’s Choice, Arthur Jafa—Less Is Morbid at MoMA, NYC
Until July 5, 2026.
Arthur Jafa’s contribution to MoMA’s Artist’s Choice series is less an exhibition than an act of re-seeing. Titled Less Is Morbid, it unfolds as a dense, insistently relational installation drawn from more than 80 works in the Museum’s collection. Rather than presenting a thesis in linear form, Jafa builds a field of visual correspondences—rhymes, frictions, affinities—that resist easy resolution. The result is not chaos but a charged clarity, one that asks viewers to reconsider how museums make meaning, and at what cost.
Jafa is best known for his own films, collages, and installation works propelled by what he has described as images with “affective capacity,” capable of carrying emotional, historical, and psychic weight at once. Here, he applies that sensibility to the museum itself. Paintings, photographs, sculptures, and archival objects are placed in deliberate proximity: Jean-Michel Basquiat alongside Cy Twombly; Roy DeCarava in conversation with Ming Smith; Lygia Clark crossing paths with Kase2; Piet Mondrian near the quilts of Lutisha Pettway. These are not provocations for their own sake. They are propositions about how meaning accrues when difference is allowed to coexist rather than be ranked.
Many of the works share an overall compositional logic, pushing against the frame and refusing containment. That visual excess becomes conceptual. Jafa collapses familiar binaries—minimalist and maximalist, sparse and dense, individual and collective—revealing how such oppositions have long structured both art history and institutional taste. In this setting, minimalism no longer reads as neutral or universal. It becomes historically specific, bound up with ideals of order, restraint, and control that have shaped modern museums and, by extension, their exclusions.
The exhibition’s title riffs on the modernist mantra “less is more,” often attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose steel column appears here as a literal and symbolic anchor. In the 20th century, that slogan helped define not only architectural aesthetics but also museum values, privileging supposed rationality and purity over forms of expression coded as excessive, emotional, or unruly. Black, queer, and feminine modes of making were frequently positioned on the wrong side of that divide. Jafa’s intervention does not reject modernism outright; instead, it subjects its moral claims to scrutiny.
What emerges is a vision of the museum as a site of responsibility rather than authority. Jafa’s installation does not smooth over differences or resolve historical violence. It insists on adjacency—on the difficult work of looking across, rather than up or down. As Jafa puts it, “The answer to disorder in the universe is not genocide. The answer is in how we coexist.”
Organized with a curatorial team that reflects MoMA’s evolving institutional structure, Less Is Morbid feels pointedly of the present moment. It asks what it means to collect, to display, and to care for objects—and for histories—without reducing them to formal ideals. In doing so, Jafa turns the museum’s own language back on itself, proposing not that less is more, but that less, unexamined, can be deadly.