Although still the preferred mode of artistic expression, with its neutrality, distance and clinical clarity, the white cube increasingly feels out of place for work focused on memory, identity and everyday social realities. Exhibits are moving out of controlled interiors and into spaces that feel lived-in, unstable, and even charged, marking a shift toward a focused, site-responsive environment that is played out in domestic, commercial, and small-scale settings. These are shows you don’t just watch—you come in, sit down and get wrapped up in them.
This change is driven in part by material pressures: gallery closures, budget cuts and space limitations. But it is also conceptual, shaped by what I would call “the desire for authenticity.” Abandoned storefronts, homes, architectural landmarks, motels and re-purposed theaters carry a rich texture and narrative. These are pre-social media worlds where we can gather and be present, and they resist neutrality. When the context ceases to function as background and becomes visible. With NY Art Week just around the corner, there’s been a shadow here since LA Art Week.
At the shuttered 99 Cents Only store, The Hole and Barry McGee turned hypermarketing into a form of exhibitionism, stacking works on dusty shelves until browsing became choreography and accumulation. At Hollyhock House, Ryan Preciado, working with Karma Gallery, has made Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark work a living experience, where visitors are rhythmically guided through architecture and sculpture. And at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, a theater that became a labyrinth of cinema, collapsed motion pictures, installations and popcorn in the spectacle.
If this project draws a broad change, Del Vaz Projects, the collaborative team led by Jay Ezra Nayssan, takes it to something more immersive, extreme and emotionally affecting. Their practice goes wild in every exhibition, performance and publication, collapsing the difference in the perfect place. Their “commitment to queer artists” is not a mission statement but a method: it shapes how space is organized, how people gather and how meaning accumulates.
This approach is on full display in “Steven Arnold: Cocktails in Heaven” (through June 6) which treats show-making as a tug of war between careful scholarship and spiritual connection. The show kicked off with a VIP opening sponsored by Frieze and co-curated by Karen Hillenburg and Christine Messineo. The guest list was, literally, spectacular: translated as eight-foot-long calligraphed scrolls, carried by Louis XIV-style attendants in Arnold-painted coats and powdered wigs, who punctuated the words with panache and large instruments. The opening was not just an art world event but a world building event. “It turned into a meeting, there [Steven] he came to us,” commented Nayssan.” In line with Del Vaz’s performance, the project is between raw sincerity and theater, a joyful flourish, which is the point at the same time.” The opening demonstrated Del Vaz’s deep commitment to scholarship and internationalization.
At the center of the exhibition is a recreation of Zanzabar, Arnold’s former home and studio, remembered as a place of “world-building and genre-bending.” It served as a home, a salon, a stage and a social gathering. Rather than reconstruct it as it is, architect Orrin Whalen was tasked with creating an “experimental community container,” a structure based on careful research but open to instability. Not only does it showcase Arnold’s multifaceted practice, the program also highlights his artistic community with works by RAL West, Kaisik Wong and Alex & Lee. The goal is space over repetition: the renewal of the psychological and social field.
At first, that atmosphere became dense and visible. Lighting, spatial choreography and archival materials are combined into something akin to the psychic architecture of Arnold’s practice. A long banquet table doubles as an altar and stage. Large bottles of Ruinart Champagne lit up the entire courtyard. The menu alternated between high and low registers: pork in clothes, oysters, Middle Eastern delicacies and Marie Callender-inspired fare. The incense that had been burned in Arnold’s studio perfumed the air. Taste, smell and touch were not additive but structural.
Nayssan describes Arnold’s practice as “aesthetic flatness,” where “a lot of visual beauty, references, lines, [and] styles fall into each other.” Arnold’s art is not to be viewed, but lived and experienced in the context of his multi-layered decadence, East meets West, embracing the “beauty of pastiche.” It is, he notes, both “serious and measured” and full of “jokes and playfulness.” There is no clean solution; the definition is overwhelming and contradictory. This show is an invitation to be a part of the big stage where “all the shiny things were.”
Performance expands this concept. Artists working with archival materials are encouraged not to reproduce but to reinvent. Tyler Matthew Oyer filmed figures taken from Arnold’s parties: a living white statue of David, bodies painted in gold and silver shifting between stillness and movement, and a seated Adonis plastering the banquette with a rotting pose.
“Reality and metaphor came together,” Nayssan said, as the night progressed into something closer to living history than simulation. Arnold’s description of his studio serves as an instruction: “as Barnum and Bailey tricked Louis the Fourteenth, by pulling…
Sound also shapes nature. A DJ set by Victor Rodriguez kept the night going, reinforcing the idea that this is as much a social event as a visual composition.
Importantly, the project does not end in a surrealist bacchanalian night. The sessions of painting nude people, the Meeting of Sex and the Spirit of Steven Arnold on April 25 and the powerful publication expand the exhibition in the intellectual and public sphere, revealing Arnold’s practice in all performance, mystery and domestic practices. Participation becomes central: visitors don’t just attend, they complete the work by being there.
This is where the broader change becomes clear. The viewer is no longer outside the work, watching from a sterile distance. They are folded into its own logic, time and space. Viewers are not singular, but they are shared together with the artist’s work, their spirit and their community.
There are echoes here of previous research, particularly the 1960s and 1970s, when artists blurred the boundaries between art and life in domestic and developed environments. What feels different now is how fully these techniques are incorporated into the curated shows themselves. The exhibition is no longer just a container; it is an artistic way of life.
In all these projects, immersion is not just a spectacle. It is relational, affective and often unstable. Or, as Nayssan puts it, “it reminds people of what can happen when one collaborates, when the separation from the walls is reduced… The white cube, by contrast, begins to read less as automatic and more as one option among many: controlled, readable, but it is no longer the only stage in the city. Further, the question is not how to show art, but how to build the world around it – and who is invited to live in it.”
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