"Season of Apologies"

 Sasha Stiles, A Living Poem (MoMA), Artificial intelligence masquerading as poetry, a spectacle that insists on being profound while often collapsing into algorithmic babble. Stiles’ collaboration with her AI alter ego, Technelegy, is billed as “an infinite text,” but infinity here feels more like an endless loop of prompts and datasets, dressed up with MoMA’s gravitas. The installation rewrites itself every hour, yet the rewriting rarely transcends novelty. It’s a screensaver with delusions of grandeur, a digital oracle that mistakes recursion for revelation. The museum’s attempt to canonize this experiment as “language art” is less about poetry and more about branding, MoMA flexing its relevance in the AI age. The result? A living poem that feels less alive than embalmed in code. 

 Wifredo Lam, When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream (MoMA), Lam’s retrospective is overdue, but the curatorial framing reeks of penitence, MoMA scrambling to atone for decades of sidelining his transcultural modernism. The show parades 130 works across six decades, yet the narrative leans heavily on Lam’s Afro Caribbean “act of decolonization,” flattening his complexity into a slogan, his paintings, undeniably powerful are forced into a didactic mold, every brushstroke treated as a manifesto, every figure as a political cipher. The museum’s guilt is palpable and it smothers the art.  Lam deserves confrontation, not canonization, his surrealist hybridity resists neat packaging. Instead, MoMA delivers a lecture disguised as an exhibition, where the dreamscape is drowned in curatorial self flagellation. 

 Arthur Jafa, Less Is Morbid (MoMA), Jafa’s curation of 80 works from MoMA’s collection is pitched as a “reseeing,” but it lands as a heavy handed morality play, his montage sensibility, so electric in film, becomes diluted in the gallery, where the juxtapositions feel more like academic exercises than visceral shocks. The exhibition insists on paradigm shifts in Black visual culture, yet the selections often lean on predictable icons, as if MoMA’s vault were raided for the usual suspects. The title promises morbidity but the show delivers solemnity without bite. Jafa’s brilliance lies in emotional velocity, here, the pacing drags, the juxtapositions sag, and the moral reckoning feels staged. Less is morbid, indeed, but sometimes less is just less.  

 The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower (MoMA), Kurokawa’s Tokyo tower, dismantled in 2022, is resurrected here as a fetish object, capsule A1305 displayed like a relic of modular utopia. The exhibition romanticizes the building’s “unexpected uses,” but the narrative glosses over its failure, the tower was a decaying husk long before MoMA acquired its capsule. The archival materials, models, and interviews are presented with reverence, yet the show sidesteps the obvious, Metabolism’s promise of adaptability collapsed under the weight of reality. Instead of confronting the tower’s demise as a cautionary tale, MoMA embalms it as nostalgia, a shrine to futurism that never arrived. The capsule sits in the gallery like a coffin for architectural optimism, polished but hollow.