The key to the next generation of museums is... TV?

How a new breed of art institutions is leveraging an old but weirdly resonant media model.

• Photo by Luis Valladolid on Unsplash

Welcome back to The Gray Market! In today’s edition, I channel surf across media to chart how upstart museums are becoming the latest cultural forces to lean into the idiot box for contemporary cachet.

As a reminder, TGM is a completely solo, twice-weekly project funded entirely by readers who think enough of what I do to put their (or at least their employers’) money behind it. If you too want to support my never-ending expedition through the art business’s various side doors and secret passages, consider upgrading your membership. Every additional paid subscriber powers up my journalism like Mario getting his li’l white-gloved hands on a mushroom or fire flower.

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Has the museum model as we know it already peaked? Do American art institutions have it in them to relentlessly compete against every other candidate for attention in the infinite stream of content that defines the 2020s? And if it’s not a lost cause yet, how exactly should museums old and new adapt to give themselves a fighting chance in this melee?

I’m reconsidering all these questions after talking with Artnet News national art critic, Art Angle co-host, and friend of TGM Ben Davis about the cultural trends he’s watching in 2026 at the inaugural Gray Market Live a couple nights ago. One of the themes we batted back and forth (from his longer roundup post) is the rise of the post-immersive museum. The term is shorthand for a new breed of art institution—one that aims to take the crowd-pleasing, selfie-optimizing mandate of Instagram traps like the Museum of Ice Cream and inject it with enough substance and sophistication to justify calling what’s inside art.

Two landmark post-immersive museums will open in the US in 2026 if all goes according to plan. Generative AI colossus Refik Anadol is set to debut Dataland, his 20,000 square-foot institution for algorithmic art, in Downtown LA this spring. On the opposite coast, the veteran digital art collector Robert Rosenkranz and the museum stalwart Joseph C. Thompson plan to launch Canyon, a new-look nonprofit dedicated to moving-image work, in a gut-renovated, 42,000 square-foot space on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Although Dataland and Canyon differ in the details, both are trying to rethink how institutions can use art to attract and engage new audiences, especially young people. And the most useful way to frame what they’re up to—and what it would mean for the wider museum landscape if they succeed—is to look at it through two surprisingly related prisms: the Museum of Ice Cream itself, and 21st century TV.

Cream of the crop

Since the Museum of Ice Cream is effectively the Abraham of all Instagram traps, it deserves to be our first stop on this journey. (Also, let’s just call it the MIC from here on out, yeah?)¹ Words like “immersive” and “experiential” have hovered around the business from the beginning. Its co-founders even tried to incept the world into calling their creation an “experium”—a mashup of “experience” and “museum.”²

How much the MIC deserves any of these associations is a separate question. True, it is immersive in the sense that it gives visitors the chance to hurl themselves down a multistory slide, splash around in a (supposedly) “world-famous” Sprinkle Pool, and romp into any number of other cute dessert-themed setups for social pics. But I also feel like calling this stuff anything other than just “play” risks plunging us even deeper into a world where words don’t really have meanings anymore.³

No matter how you categorize the MIC, however, there’s no denying its success. A pitch deck from the museum’s parent company claims that each location was bringing in 750,000 annual visitors as of 2022. If true, this stat means every iteration was as popular as the Guggenheim, which ranked as the 75th best-attended museum in the world in The Art Newspaper’s annual visitor figures survey that same year.

But the MIC didn’t become a phenomenon because it’s cheap to visit. On the contrary, when I wrote about its plan to open a permanent flagship in New York in 2019, I found that the planned cost of a general admission ticket ($38) was higher than at any major art museum in America.

• General admission prices for the Museum of Ice Cream vs the 10 most expensive major US art museums in 2019. Data and chart by TGM

What makes the pricing feel even more delirium-inducing is that the attractions inside every MIC location are, if not worthless, then at least eminently replaceable. For example, the Rijksmuseum had to pay millions of euros over multiple years to clean and retouch The Night Watch, according to the institution’s director in 2018, but the MIC is never going to have to invest serious cash in a skilled professional to meticulously conserve the Sprinkle Pool. It never has to rotate what’s on view, either, let alone insure it or store it in climate-controlled quarters. Everything inside is only as valuable as it is conducive to a fun selfie.

Things have only gotten pricier as the MIC has expanded over the past six-plus years. Aside from its New York location, the business currently operates experiential paeans to frozen sweets in Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Miami, and Singapore. General admission at the Manhattan flagship is still $38.99 during sleepy weekday time slots, but it jumps as high as $59 for peak weekend access. Or you can upgrade to a VIP ticket—including priority entry, one drink, and “cool collectibles”—for $63.99 to $89, depending on your precise timing and level of interest in mocking the value of a dollar.

From a pure business standpoint, though, the MIC has cracked the code. It charges significantly higher ticket prices than real art museums and runs a merch operation that is at least as good, if not better, all while having to pay significantly lower, and fewer, expenses than real art museums do. Which is great, as long as you don’t want the attraction you’re running to be taken as seriously as a real art museum.

But if you do want that, the MIC model only gets you so far. And this is where TV enters the chat.

TV eye

In a recent post called Everything Is Television, the journalist Derek Thompson unspooled his theory that all roads in new media are, weirdly, converging on the decades-old format in his headline.

Everything Is Television

Exhibit A is social media. In a 2025 legal filing in an antitrust case against Meta, the tech giant’s lawyers alleged that users spend more than 80% of their time on Facebook and more than 90% of their time on Instagram just passively watching videos, not interacting with each other. Social media, in other words, is no longer really “social” at all.

What about podcasts? Well, Thompson reports…

Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube has quietly become the most popular platform for podcasts, and it’s not even close. On Spotify, the number of video podcasts has nearly tripled since 2023, and video podcasts are significantly outgrowing non-video podcasts.

Last but not least, AI—the technology marketed by its developers as the key to a new era of human progress—seems to be following the same path into a bygone era. OpenAI’s most recent product is Sora, whose only aspiration is to mimic TikTok, except strictly with videos generated through text prompts to a chatbot. Meta is also running out a competitor, called Vibes, because apparently the best complement to having two social (“social”) networks where people mostly watch videos that might be AI is a dedicated app where people only watch videos that must be AI.

This leads us back to Dataland and its founder, Anadol. Even though advanced algorithms are the engine, his works ultimately just function as video. Their level of immersiveness strictly depends on how many surfaces they’re projected onto in a given space. Unsupervised, his fan favorite 2022 lobby commission at MoMA, ran continuously on a single screen for hours at a time. You can say that calling it TV undersells the work, but in a Derek Thompsonian sense, it wouldn’t be wrong.

Is Canyon’s story different? We already know it’s an institution committed to moving-image work (aka video). Its director told Zachary Small at the Times that the galleries “will be equipped more like living rooms than a typical white box.” Small added that they “would have time bars over the doors, telling viewers if a video was in progress and when it would end; visitors would be able to take their food and drinks into the galleries.” Sounds an awful lot like an institution built around the spirit of TV, doesn’t it?

You can also make the same case for every museum and standalone installation opened to date by teamLab, the Japanese-founded immersive art outfit that consistently draws blockbuster crowds around the world. As with Anadol’s practice, some teamLab pieces are more experiential or interactive than others, but at the end of the day they’re mostly just kinetic digital images running on screens or projected onto surfaces. So here too distinguishing between immersive art and TV devolves into semantics.

Racing in parallel

At one point in our discussion at TGM Live, Ben wondered if the goal of post-immersive museums was to be something like “peak TV,” the coinage for the roughly 10-year period where the very best TV shows were widely considered on par with great movies (and the sheer production volume of scripted series overwhelmed Hollywood). Basically, his question was whether new-breed institutions like Dataland and Canyon could combine the accessibility of the Museum of Ice Cream with the prestige of a traditional art museum—or at least some approximation of it.

The more I’ve considered it, though, the more I’ve started thinking that the skeleton key isn’t just the format of peak TV; it’s the business of peak TV. Ted Sarandos, now the co-chief executive of Netflix, said in a 2013 interview that his company’s goal was “to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” In other words, Netflix was aiming to upgrade the quality of its original content to the gold standard that HBO represented before HBO could figure out how to upgrade its streaming, distribution, and licensing capabilities to the gold standard that Netflix represented.

Traditional museums and post-immersive museums are now competing in a parallel race. Phrased one way, the key question is whether an institution like Canyon can become MoMA faster than MoMA can become an institution like Canyon.

There are some good reasons to think that the answer might be yes. The most important is that post-immersive museums are much nimbler than their established peers. They don’t have hundreds or thousands of physical objects to steward. They don’t have dozens and dozens of trustees with competing agendas. They don’t have decades, let alone centuries, of institutional memory to preserve and honor.⁴

In this sense, they have all the strengths that another modern media exec has been championing throughout his career. Barry Diller, who ran ABC and Paramount before co-founding Fox with Rupert Murdoch, has argued over and over again that trying to fix a dysfunctional business model is often a massive waste of time. The superior solution is usually to walk away and begin fresh.

“I think the best thing that you can ever have is a clean piece of paper,” he said in a 2017 interview. “Meaning, nothing is sacred—you get to just start.“

Post-immersive institutions have that opportunity. Will they be able to capitalize on it by attracting Museum of Ice Cream-sized crowds with MoMA-quality art—or something even closer to either? The only way to find out is to stay tuned.

1. “MIC” strikes me as a better option than “MoIC,” an acronym that makes it sound like I’m pronouncing my older brother’s name with a busted approximation of a Cockney accent. I feel like I have the right to choose because, as far as I can tell, the in-house comms and marketing teams never abbreviate the name in any of their official materials—it’s always referred to in full as “the Museum of Ice Cream,” like the Medal of Honor or the Alamo.

2. Fortunately, “experium” never caught on, so we can chuck it into the incinerator alongside “phygital” and an array of other linguistic abominations inbred on the supposed frontier of the art world.

3. Don’t get me started on the zoomer-led rebrand of sipping a cup of coffee or tea as “caffeine-edging.” That said, I should note that the MIC’s website refers to its attractions as “playscapes,” which is pretty apt IMO.

4. I don’t want to downplay the costs and operational challenges of preserving media artwork; both are bigger than people who aren’t in the business of moving images tend to realize. Even still, almost any digital-first museum has a distinct advantage over one that has to exhibit, move, store, maintain, and insure physical objects.