'Tourist vs. Purist': Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech’ and What Happens To An Object Not Produced For A Museum

Abstract

Virgil Abloh’s “FIGURES OF SPEECH” made its debut in New York City at the Brooklyn Museum on July 1, 2022. Chronicling all of the prolific designer's significant work from 1980 - 2019, according to the artist himself, his creative partners, and organized by Michael Darling, the exhibition initially resided within the walls of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) until September 2021. The show served as Abloh’s only solo exhibition before his tragic passing in November 2021 from a rare form of heart cancer. While the legacy of Abloh will live on in designers and creatives today, the version of the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum inspecific showcased an incomplete and, at times, confusing museum going experience that unsuccessfully communicated to the vast public what his legacy is to begin with and why he is regarded as a modern day renaissance man by individuals like myself. Rooted in the intersections between commerce, the museum itself, exhibition design, and the “museumification” of an object as it pertains to visual culture, I argue that, in this instance regarding Abloh, trying to showcase the totality of an artist respective work within the confines of this exhibition space both fails and succeeds based entirely on the individual visitors prior knowledge about the artist, the exhibition design and accompanying pamphlet/catalog. These factors created a museum going experience inherently tied to elitism, something that Abloh fought against in all manner of mediums, and left me wondering if this was yet another instance of the ‘Tourist Vs. Purist’ theory, ironically, proposed by the artist himself as a marker for success.