We’ve reached the point in rock’n’roll history where the next commodity is the traveling museum exhibit. For various reasons, this makes sense: aging legends aren’t touring as much or at all, the ticket prices to those concerts can be prohibitive to the merely curious, and once you’ve issued the box sets and the remasters and the remastered remasters, legacy acts are still accumulating fans who want to participate in fandom beyond buying a t-shirt from Urban Outfitters and listening to some playlists on Spotify. Overt commercialism aside, a well-executed exhibit can put the artist in context, helping to answer the questions of why these bands made history in the first place, and why they matter still to so many people.
While the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has been sending out traveling versions of their artist-centric exhibits for years, the bar was raised in 2013 with DAVID BOWIE IS, the highly-lauded exhibit curated by the V&A in London and now touring the world (currently in Italy, heading to Tokyo in 2017). The Rolling Stones now enter the exhibition world with their own self-produced career-spanning retrospective, called Exhibitionism, which opened in May in London and debuted last week in New York City, taking over tens of thousands of square feet at Industria in the West Village.
Unlike DAVID BOWIE IS, where Bowie granted full access to his archive but otherwise declined to participate, or a Rock Hall exhibit assembled by their curators and other archivists, Exhibitionism feels thoroughly secular. It’s deliberately crafted to appeal to a very wide audience, so it’s not tailored to the Stones freaks, nor does it exist in a highly curated and contextual museum environment. This is about the Stones wanting to control the process of defining themselves and their legacy. Unsurprisingly, they recount their own history with the same calculated methodology they used to present themselves to rock’n’roll and the world at large.
The statement of intent, as posted at the entrance to the exhibition, begins by announcing: “Exhibitionism is a celebration and thematic exploration of the creative life of a band that has managed both to stay current and stay true to its artistic vision for more than half a century.” It’s probably important to note here that curator Ilene Gallagher’s website touts that she “has been helping organizations tell their stories for 30 years.” While the Rolling Stones are a group of independent humans, they are also an organization whose raison d’etre is the propagation of their own tribal myth. Keith Richards might laugh that he “wouldn’t expect somebody to come see my old cast-offs” (as he told Pitchfork at the exhibit’s opening), but of course then he snaps back to the party line about how “the Stones mean a hell of a lot to millions of people.”
Within Exhibitionism, you’ll find some earnestness, some flash, and (not unexpectedly, nor inappropriately) a boatload of braggadocio, all wrapped in the unmistakable sheen that has become a trademark of Rolling Stones, Inc. (or technically Musidor BV, as the band’s rights-holding arm is known). Your modern-day Rolling Stones are a slick, commodified concern, and Exhibitionism inherits this trait by its very existence—it’s unavoidable. The Stones created their machine in order to stop losing money (something they allude to in the exhibit, but don’t go into any meaningful detail about), but now they literally do not know how to turn it off and operate in any other way, even when they might want to.
The exhibit opens with what’s meant to be a faithful recreation of the band’s flat in Edith Grove, the place where Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, and others lived together in the early days. If you're a fan, you’ll remember the endless stories of the awful condition of that first communal flat, and this will likely match the picture in your imagination that you’ve carried for all these years. There are blues records on the stereo, posters of local shows on the wall, clothes and bottles and cigarette butts everywhere. It’s almost perverse that the immediate opening of the exhibit devotes two very large rooms to this mess, but the band seem rather proud of it, based on interviews they’ve given around the exhibit.
For those who might not know early Stones history chapter and verse, there’s narration from Mick and Keith piped in. This is one place where Exhibition (at least in its Industria incarnation) fails, full stop: throughout the entire exhibit, it is very difficult to hear the in-exhibit narration because the next section’s narration or music bleeds through. Sometimes this is mediated by headphones or video with subtitles, but it’s a problem throughout—andone that’s frankly inexcusable for an exhibit at this level.
After a while of walking through Exhibitionism, you realize that the Stones were quite good about holding on to their equipment over the years. They also negotiated with the biggest Stones collectors for other artifacts, but they give short shrift to so many other things: there’s only about half a dozen pages of handwritten lyrics, and the only setlists are from the last two decades. They have video footage of Keith discussing their recording process, but every other video on studio matters features producer Don Was, who didn’t even work with the Stones until the 1990s. It’s inconceivable that they couldn’t get any other past collaborators to participate, so you’re left with the conclusion that the band didn’t think it was important enough to bother with. Nearby, the exhibit touts an “interactive recording studio,” which is actually an iPad with headphones that sort of lets you manipulate individual tracks for a selection of eight different songs. It ends up feeling like a missed opportunity to have created something genuinely innovative or at least engrossing—give people more songs and choices to play with. (Also, no one wants to remix 2013’s “Doom and Gloom.”)
The second floor of Exhibitionism is devoted to the Stones’ visual identity, which might sound a little dry if it weren’t for the fact that their tongue and lips are one of the most recognizable logos in not just the history of rock, but throughout the history of branding as well. You might glance around the gallery and think you’ve seen it all before; that’s because it started right around here. There are posters. There are advertisements. There are Warhol Polaroids. The album art segment is fascinating—it was the one place this writer learned things she was not previously aware of (like how the Sticky Fingers cover with the real zipper was damaging the vinyl, until someone realized that if the record was shipped unzipped, the damage would occur in the center, which didn’t impact the grooves). It’s hard to say if this section was thin on information, or if they presented all the information that they had in their possession—not everyone was keeping copies of sketches for posterity back in those days—but it was so thoroughly interesting and full of substance that it left you wanting more.
The style section highlights the Stones’ wardrobe from the ’60s up to the mid-’00s, and it could stand alone as its own exhibit in any museum in the world. This proves to be another area where the band held onto things: the cape Mick wore at Altamont, a replica of the flouncy poet blouse Mick wore at the Hyde Park show when Brian Jones died, the Ossie Clark jumpsuits that have come to visually represent the Stones in the ’70s. As for other components that are considered de rigeur for such exhibits, not all were easy wins. Instead of an overview of the band on film, Martin Scorsese provides his reviews of major Stones movies over the years (including his own). It’s an eight-minute master class in film criticism, provided by someone who absolutely understands both the Rolling Stones, rock’n’roll, and the role each has played in the culture. Once he’s done talking, the natural reaction would be to want to watch what he discussed, but this element is curiously absent.
In fact, the entire exhibit is a letdown when it comes to watching the Stones in action. Whereas DAVID BOWIE IS featured a very large room showing concert footage from all eras and used geotracking headphones that magically played the corresponding audio, Exhibitionism herds you into a tiny black box, hands you a pair of 3D glasses, and plays footage of “Satisfaction” from the band’s 2013 Hyde Park 2013 show on a medium-sized movie screen. This section of the exhibit is touted as “an exciting and powerful backstage-to-onstage 3D concert experience!”—but is anything but that. It doesn’t illustrate the power of the Stones to either their longtime fans or, more importantly, to people who have never seen them. The end result feels artificial—more Disneyland than rock’n’roll. Perhaps this is where you’ll flash to the beginning of the exhibit—the two rooms from Edith Grove—and wonder how the band and their team could think that was more important than getting the live experience right.
Overall, there are aspects of Exhibitionism worth seeing, for diehards and rock grazers alike. But as a definitive representation of the Rolling Stones’ legacy, the exhibit fails in too many places. It’s a fascinating collection of artifacts, all assembled without the objectivity and contextualization that would have produced something of truly lasting value. However, at $37 for a ticket (one of the band’s better bargains in years), Stones fans are bound to come knocking regardless, wherever Exhibitionism may travel next—which Stones Inc. knows perfectly well.