Stedelijk Exhibition on Masculinity Draws Criticism for Its Manosphere Hook
The Stedelijk’s latest exhibition arrives with a title that promises cultural urgency, but one review argues that the premise is doing more marketing work than curatorial work. “Beyond the Manosphere: Masculinities Today” is set to travel to Kunstmuseum St. Gallen at the end of the year, and its framing has already become part of the debate around it.
According to the review, the exhibition borrows the charged language of the manosphere while quickly distancing itself from the very phenomenon it names. Rein Wolfs and Gianni Jetzer, who lead the Stedelijk and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen respectively, say the show does not seek to reproduce or sensationalize that online world. Instead, they describe it as a critical and cultural investigation into how masculinity is constructed, performed, projected, resisted, and undone.
The criticism is that the exhibition’s structure never quite escapes the logic it claims to examine. Organized around Legacy, Violence, Desire, and Norms, it is presented as a broad meditation on masculinity, but the review argues that those themes feel familiar rather than newly sharpened. The question is not whether museums can address gender, but whether this particular framing adds anything to a conversation that has already been well mapped.
That sense of déjà vu is reinforced by the exhibition’s art-historical references. The review points to earlier museum projects including “Bravehearts: Men in Skirts” at the Met, “Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear” at the V&A, “Masculinities: Liberation through Photography” at the Barbican, and “The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation” at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. In other words, the terrain is not new.
The review also suggests that the show’s most compelling material lies at the edges of what it includes. Ryan Trecartin, Hito Steyerl, and Ed Fornieles are cited as artists whose work more directly engages the digital subcultures and male aggression the title evokes, yet they are not part of the exhibition itself. Instead, the show moves toward a more conventional account of masculinity as something constructed and variable.
Within that framework, Lucy McKenzie’s If It Moves Kiss It (2002) is described as the strongest work in the Legacy section. Sophie Calle’s Young Girl’s Dream (1992) and Diamond Stingily’s Orgasms Happened Here (Hot Girl) (2024) also appear in the discussion, underscoring the exhibition’s range even as the review questions its conceptual focus.
The sharpest objection is not to the subject, but to the packaging. By invoking the manosphere as a headline concept, the exhibition risks reproducing the very attention economy it claims to critique. For a show about masculinity, the review suggests, that tension is impossible to ignore.
