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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tNot a whit of it, however, has anything to do with what the opening wall text describes as a \u201cloose network of online spaces where a dominant, misogynistic masculinity is asserted that, to many, feels threatening.\u201d You know: that slurry of pickup artists, black-pill incels, looksmaxxers, peptide-selling biohackers. There are sad lonely digital boys out there, and there is art that grapples with their world: Ryan Trecartin comes to mind. There is also art that, per the directors, \u201capproaches the topic critically and culturally\u201d\u2014think: Hito Steyerl\u2019s 2013 How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File<\/em> or Ed Fornieles\u2019 2019 <\/em>Cel<\/em>, his performance-installation about online far-right male aggression<\/em>. But none of that is included here because the manosphere is not of interest to the exhibition beyond its utility as an SEO keyword.<\/p>\n \n\tInstead, the show treads far more conventional and familiar ground: masculinity as constructed and variable. This is hardly new. See: \u201cBravehearts: Men in Skirts\u201d at the Met in 2003 or \u201cFashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear\u201d at the V&A in 2022. The Barbican featured \u201cMasculinities: Liberation through Photography\u201d in 2020, but 25 years earlier, in 1995, the MIT List Visual Arts Center showed \u201cThe Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tSo when \u201cBeyond the Manosphere\u201d asks \u201cWhat does it mean to be a man today?\u201d it raises the question: did no one involved attend any of those last thirty years of shows? For the conceptual water here is muddied in the sole way it shouldn\u2019t be by now: eliding \u201cbeing a man\u201d and masculinity. It does not take a doctorate in gender theory to know that the very concept of masculinity as something that can wane or be purchased\u2014the twinned anxiety and hucksterism that fuels the manosphere\u2014shows their absolute difference.<\/p>\n \n\tThis show, then, works off a tired map, and its central themes\u2014Legacy, Violence, Desire, and Norms\u2014traffic in the very conventions it seeks to undo.<\/p>\n \n\tCurator Melanie B\u00fchler lost me at Serra. Her catalog essay opens with an exhibition origin story in the form of an anecdote about the difficulty she faced at St. Gallen installing exhibitions around Richard Serra\u2019s Thelma, is that you? (For Lena Horne)<\/em> (1983). Describing it as \u201ca grand, unwieldy piece of art history, too heavy and costly to remove\u201d and \u201ca display of power,\u201d B\u00fchler slides into a theory of masculinity as an entitlement to be imposing: \u201cThat which is inevitable is masculine, still.\u201d Really? Still? Paging Beverly Pepper. Louise Bourgeois. Niki de Saint Phalle.<\/p>\n \n\tBut if you come for the king, you best not miss. The Stedelijk\u2019s ostensible counter-legacy to the impositions of male art history include the high-heeled struts of Sylvie Fleury\u2019s video Walking on Carl Andre<\/em> (1997), which supplants minimalism with hyper-feminized superficiality. Inverting any binary just preserves the binary: this is no post-gender politics. Likewise, it\u2019s not obvious that the massive imitation-gold ruins of John Miller\u2019s Mourning for a World of Rubbish<\/em> (2020) or Eduardo Paolozzi\u2019s twisting Neo-Saxeiraz<\/em> (1966) are any less space-consuming than the Serra: they\u2019re just less abstract and lack his radicality. Serra\u2019s materials may be macho in scale, but his forms activate the fragility and vulnerability of the body, an experiential lightness of being that undercuts any simplistic description of his work as \u201cphallic.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe most compelling piece in the \u201cLegacy\u201d section is If It Moves Kiss It<\/em> (2002), Lucy McKenzie\u2019s wall-covering mural reproducing a desecrated municipal painting that appears in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s A Clockwork Orange<\/em>. Stylized neoclassical bodies of laboring men in loincloths are graffitied with speech\u2014\u201cSuck it and see,\u201d \u201cOuch hurts great\u201d\u2014alongside lolling tongues and dicks. Context changes everything: what appears in the film as antisocial iconoclasm here declaims a cartoonish homoeroticism that undercuts the solemnity of straight virility.<\/p>\n \n\tSo much for \u201cLegacy\u201d; elsewhere, the category distinctions mean little.<\/p>\n \n\tThe works classed under \u201cViolence\u201d and those under \u201cDesire\u201d could be swapped without anyone noticing. Sophie Calle\u2019s Young Girl\u2019s Dream<\/em> (1992) traffics in the tension between desires felt and desires imputed, but is filed under \u201cViolence.\u201d Diamond Stingily\u2019s Orgasms Happened Here (Hot Girl)<\/em> (2024), a quickly-digested literalism consisting of a closet of men\u2019s shirts in front of pictures of half-naked women, appears under \u201cDesire,\u201d though its placard writes about exploitation. \u201cDesire\u201d also includes Hans Eijkelboom\u2019s studies of \u201cthe ideal man\u201d\u2014though its taxonomy is perfect for \u201cNorm.\u201d (Hal Fischer\u2019s \u201cGay Semiotics\u201d would have been the better inclusion anyway\u2014nothing transforms masculinity like men in leather chaps. There is, in general, far too little queer and transmasc culture in the show. I kept looking for Harry Dodge, for Cassils, for Del LaGrace Volcano\u2026)<\/p>\n \n\tThe most interesting room is the one viewers are apt to spend the least time in. It comprises three unrelated works in a space bathed in electric yellow light. P. Staff\u2019s Afferent Nerves<\/em> (2023) consists of an overhead net connected to the building\u2019s electricity, which produces a crackling, dreadful soundscape. In the center, a neon-green dystopic terrarium contains the tiny figurines of Tetsumi Kudo\u2019s Cultivation by Radio-activity in the Electronic Circuit<\/em> (1968). Though the exhibition highlights his \u201cphilosophy of impotence,\u201d Kudo\u2019s post-war call to dissolve dominance was really a futuristic eco-politics\u2014not imagining life after men but after the human. Elsewhere, a monitor shows Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy\u2019s Family Tyrant (Modeling and Molding) \/ Cultural Soup<\/em> (1987), in which they play a father and a son in gloriously grotesque states of masturbatory, goo-covered rage.<\/p>\n \n\tThe show ought to have leaned into that aesthetic of the unnerving, presenting more like Sam Durant\u2019s photographs of wax colonial figures, which register the uncanny kitsch of national lore. One likewise wishes that more than one piece had been included by the Dutch folk artist known as Melle, whose Boschian Tuin met Granaatappel<\/em> (1975) features an isolated self-pleasuring cock, its shaft a broken spine, longingly taking in the spilling seeds of a pomegranate.<\/p>\n \n\tAll genitalia, regarded closely, is bizarre. If we\u2019re going to get into masculinity by way of the strangeness of organs, then where is Matthew Barney\u2019s Cremaster<\/em> cycle?<\/p>\n \n\tA better title would have been Make Masculinity Weird Again<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tWe can try. Walk out of the Stedelijk and travel an hour south to the imposing Noordbrabants Museum in \u2018s-Hertogenbosch. Its current show \u201cAm I Masculine? Fashion, Art, and Photography\u201d has problems, but also great promise. For one, as if answering the Stedelijk\u2019s deficient interest in its own conceit, the Brabantish rooms are full of large vertical screens looping TikTok playlists: casual misogyny; earnest protein bros; #powerdressing girls.<\/p>\n \n\tThis omnipresent digital milieu is the counterpoint for the show\u2019s focus on the materiality of masculinity: armor and Gucci hats, but also drag fashion from Khareem Wielingen and the feminist-quote-bearing tote bag of the \u201cperformative male.\u201d As masculinity is loosed from men, lines of connection become possible: from Greek ideals to gym selfies, from suits to the structured tailoring of the 1940s woman. The signifiers of masculinity travel and this show makes room for straps and packers and the beings who might bear them.<\/p>\n \n\tThere are missteps: an eye-rolling display of paper tears on which viewers are exhorted to record vulnerabilities. But one forgives this amidst delights such as Jason Swinehammer\u2019s pink and blue crocheted Magenta Ice Jockstrap<\/em> (2021\u201322), which merges fetish eroticism with the cuddly aesthetics of the cute.<\/p>\n SweetMeat<\/em>, a 2025 film by Bart Hess, is the standout\u2014my favorite work across both exhibitions. On a spare gray platform in a spare gray room, two men face each other in the crouched tension of a wrestling stance. Each is covered in one hundred translucent candies: one set blue, one orange. They engage in a visceral, intimate fight to eat the gummies off the other\u2019s body, blurring the homosocialism of regulated masculine competition and an unregulatable switch homoeroticism. It\u2019s the desire for dominance and dominance of desire, but candy makes it play. Aggressive, but sweet.<\/p>\n \n\tThe Noordbrabants show has no exhibition catalog. Its title sounds like it is ripped from a 1980s afterschool special. But its willingness to treat masculinity as generously as possible, as plural styles of being, gets far closer to the aims of the Stedelijk, whose desperation to be topical ironically keeps clich\u00e9 alive.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tI want Richard Serra and crocheted jockstraps both. Wasn\u2019t that the point of this critique in the first place?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/columns\/stedelijk-beyond-the-manosphere-noordbrabants-am-masculine-1234785022\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/I-Want-to-go-Higher_still002-2.jpg?w=1024″] The title is a ploy and the Stedelijk knows it. \u201cBeyond the Manosphere: Masculinities Today\u201d is a clickbait thirst-trap trend-driven symptom of everything wrong with museums entering the attention-economy game. The veneer of urgency and cultural relevance feels forced and already dated. It\u2019s the tweedy teacher saying \u201cNo cap\u201d two years too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1932738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1932738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1932738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1932738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1932738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1932738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1932738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/sophie-calle-young-girls-dream-1992.jpg?w=400\")
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