Candy shop or art gallery? The sickly sweet world of Moco Museum

They sit there oozing with limpid lust; their gaping fronts expose packed shelves and zero customers. A solitary shopkeeper lingers on the threshold, immersed in a full-volume symphony of TikTok reels or trivially adjusting Nerds and Twinkies on a rotating display stand. These are the Candy Stores of Oxford Street. Together, they create a pastel-coloured Potemkin village – an illusion of retail optimism on Europe’s busiest shopping street. A few doors down from such outfits as Candylicious, Prime Candy and American Candy Land, on an imposing corner plot at 1-4 Marble Arch, a new player has entered the fray. Not edibles, but artibles.

If you haven’t heard of Moco Museum, where have you been? They already have locations in Amsterdam and Barcelona and have so far attracted five million visitors. It’s one of Venus Williams’ “favourite museums” and has welcomed a host of other celebs including Barack Obama, Steven Spielberg, Adele, Tim Cook and Dua Lipa. It houses the private collection of Kim and Lionel Logchies Prins, who founded Moco in 2016 as a “proudly independent museum” that is “for enthusiasts and art lovers alike.” Its ethos appears to be rooted in making art accessible to all. The reality is bittersweet.

I visit Moco London on a boiling August afternoon, three days after its soft opening. The exterior of the building is clad in noughties girlie-mag-pink, bubbly typography and a list of names that reads like a global poll for ‘most commercialised artist’. I enter in a blissful plume of air conditioning and, is that… ambient spa music?

Art-wise, it’s a bull ring of beefy numbers: an inflatable Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst’s spots, pills and dead butterflies, a camouflage Andy Warhol, some mediocre Jean-Michel Basquiats, a series of unrecognisable Keith Harings and a crystal-eroded Porsche by Daniel Arsham which feels more My Super Sweet Sixteen than supercar. So far, so macho, apart from an understated Yayoi Kusama tucked on a side wall. Perhaps the female artists are upstairs – a sign and another list of names points to the first floor: Emin (obvious, but ok), Murakami, Banksy, Williams (wait, who? Not Robbie, yes, Robbie!), Levine, JR, and KAWS – perhaps not.

Up here, the curation is giving art fair: little booths and cute little shows. Robbie Williams’ paintings create a shrine to self-help while Chris Levine has gone patriotic, with an entire wall of portraits of the late Queen Elizabeth II, a fun-loving photo of Elton John and naturally, a holographic Kate Moss. Why? Because This Is England! But there are some diamonds in the rough, like Monica Bovincini’s I Cannot Hide My Anger and Richard Prince’s I’m Not Linda.

I hurry past the KAWS dollies and Superflat monstrosities and towards the Banksy section. While browsing his 30th greatest hits, I’m plagued by a thought: could this entire museum be one big stunt by the graffiti artist? A sequel to Dismaland? The finale to the zoo he’s currently breeding on London’s walls? Could Moco Museum itself be an artwork about rampant consumerism, self-obsession and an art market on life support? I picture a scene, unfolding in the small hours of a late summer morning, where the whole thing packs up and leaves on a Pest Control-branded circus lorry. I think the spa music is getting to me.

I’m heading for a sugar crash, but just as I’m plotting an escape, I realise there’s a whole other floor. Turns out, even rock bottom has a basement. The focus has shifted to digital art. There’s a room dedicated to NFTs (what were they again?) and a bargain basement version of a Yayoi Kusama infinity room. There’s a gathering of small children hovering around Extinction Annihilation by Jake Chapman. I swerve to avoid them, before realising that one has a snarling snout for a mouth, another has a beak. I flinch at the freaky mannequins, then grin with delight as I’m hit with the first emotion of the afternoon.

When I finally exit through the gift shop, I find books like How to Become a Successful Artist by Magnus Resch and Crystal Clear: a Beginners Guide to Working With Stones. I find an assortment of fridge magnets with slogans like ‘No bad vibes!’ and ‘If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough!’ Then I find some sweaters and totes in Moco pink and black. One reads: ‘If you think sexuality is a choice, how do you explain the fact that women still like men?’ (I’m reminded of the time I wrote ‘BOYS STINK’ on my Year 8 pencil case). Another reads, ‘The present is female’. The present may well be, but the present company at Moco Museum certainly is not.

Moco is the sort of place that interests the mainstream press. Where other galleries fail, it gets art into the papers. What’s interesting is the language surrounding it: The Sun refers to it as an “award-winning attraction with multi-coloured indoor experiences”; Secret London describes it as “an internationally renowned museum that boasts a stellar selection of contemporary art.” Moco, like Maddox, seems to exist in parallel to the art world. It’s not really discussed in any critical sense; the art in its collection is synonymous with the penthouse pads of crypto bros and rappers. The artworks invariably feature crystals, mirrors, AI, glitter, pop colours and wall-ready ‘street art’. This is no place for a cynic, there are just too many triggers.

The ‘museum’ appears to share the same DNA with what has now become a viral rash of immersive experiences across the city: The Paradox Museum of optical illusions, the Twist Museum (AKA the playground of perceptions, also a Moco neighbour), Dopamine Land, the Balloon Museum, and to a slightly lesser extent, the Van Gogh Experience and Lightroom – attractions that are curated, packaged and lit specifically for Instagram. Last year, the immersive digital space Outernet attracted more visitors than the British Museum. Maybe we all need to get off our high horses and enjoy this new type of theme park ride. As Eddy Frankel put it in a recent Time Out review: “art in London is just entering its lobotomy era.” But people are flocking, like magpies to a Koons balloon.

In September, Moco will be officially inaugurated with a temporary exhibition by Marina Abramović. Looking at the rest of the art here, this feels quite refreshing. It’s also a little surprising: after her major RA retrospective last year, isn’t London a bit Marina-ed out? Plus, what business does a performance artist responsible for some of the most daring endurance works in history have in a place like this? Well, that’s exactly what: business. Abramović has, in recent years, become a guru of commercial art success. In a flailing art market where the conventional models are running on vapes, she has diversified, building a self-help empire, a skincare range and selling various merch including healing crystals and water glasses. The press material reads, “Moco understands the importance of direct experience in activating the power of art.” This says precisely nothing, but everything about a world built on a supposed power to transform, a fallacy sustained simply because it can’t be argued with. But if people enjoy it, who cares?

Why, you may wonder, when there are so many amazing (free) galleries and museums in London showing top-tier examples of the biggest names in visual art (and many less obvious, more important ones), would anyone pay £20 per ticket to see the world’s most famous artists’ least famous works? The answer might not be a Moco problem, but an art world problem. Even for the initiated (or those under the illusion of it), there’s still a rampant sense of inaccessibility plaguing the sector, a low-key anxiety about not getting it. Lots of stuff in the art world is designed not to be got; if it were, art would lose its biggest USP. It’s a sector that doesn’t trade on transparency or openness but on opacity and artspeak riddles. And like most acts of snobbery, the critical sniggers surrounding places like Moco could be a defence mechanism, a fear that if too many people feel included in art, its value system will crumble. Yes, the work at Moco is essentially meaningless, but what’s more meaningless is trying to force meaning where it doesn’t exist, which is one of the art world’s worst crimes.

Let’s not stretch the candy shop metaphor too far; I am aware that some Oxford Street joints have been outed as financial fronts for bad business; dirty laundry aired behind the pretty pink veneer. Aside from its taste in art, I’m not suggesting that anything at Moco does is dodgy. In fact, the business model seems sound: an innovative hybrid of commercial gallery and ticketed museum.

I arrived at Moco with a mild, heat-induced headache. I leave with a burning migraine, presumably the neurological equivalent of cottonmouth. When I resurface on Oxford Street, I see a Frameless tote, a KAWS t-shirt and a Haring x Primark cap. The virus is spreading, and perhaps that’s ok. Maybe there’s joy in people being able to read a museum wall text without a dictionary, watching friends laugh, having fun, taking selfies with the art or seeing kids crack the message behind a Banksy.

No wonder people flock to Moco. The eye candy is easy to swallow and doesn’t leave a bitter taste of exclusion. Plus, what’s wrong with the odd sweet treat? The familiar, high-octane rush of a Kusama gobstopper or a Damian Hirst fruit pastel? Just consume in moderation.