SAN FRANCISCO — An inflatable giant with a cartoonish skull-and-crossbones head perches on the roof of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, like a car-lot tube man, advertising the exhibition KAWS: Family inside. The big balloon is various shades of gray, reminiscent of another large sculpture just a few blocks away on the Embarcadero Plaza, a 40-foot-tall naked woman fabricated from steel mesh. Originally produced for Burning Man, “R-Evolution” is one of 100 sculptures in the Big Art Loop, a city-wide public art initiative privately funded by a tech billionaire. Beyond their shared vapid aesthetics, both KAWS and the Big Art Loop signal the rapid move toward the privatization of culture, and its parallel degradation, in San Francisco and beyond.
KAWS is the pseudonym of American artist Brian Donnelly. He got his start in the 1990s New York City graffiti scene, altering bus stop advertisements with his signature skull and crossbones and throwing up his eponymous tag. Early on, Donnelly seems to have figured out that marketing is the key to success. He quickly parlayed his iconic characters into branding for dozens of merch deals with fashion labels and toy companies. Only relatively recently has he been inducted into the art world. Now, the KAWS project has come to be defined by its ubiquity, pervading the market from $20 t-shirts to $14-million paintings.
KAWS: Family, which originated at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2023, is a small survey exhibition of Donnelly’s work, including a handful of large-scale sculptures, paintings, drawings, and merchandise from various brand partnerships, such as Nike, MTV, and General Mills. The wall text fails to mention a trip Donnelly made to San Francisco in 1995, where he met fellow street artist Barry McGee, whose own tagging on bus stop ads inspired Donnelly to bring the practice back to the East Coast. It’s a missed opportunity for SFMOMA to call out a local connection, but the anecdote itself highlights the way KAWS exists without a strong sense of place. That’s by design. The work severs its connection to any signifiers of a specific locale or identity in service of commercial omnipotence. A KAWS object can be whatever you want it to be — except fine art.
Donnelly’s brand identity revolves around his signature characters, which have benign and friendly names like “Companion” and “Chum,” or the slightly more conspiratorial moniker “Accomplice.” They all possess a uniform look: a skull-and-crossbones head with X’d out eyes, plopped on the body of Mickey Mouse, the Michelin Man, Boba Fett, Muppets, or various Simpsons characters. KAWS: Family shares its name with a 2021 sculpture featuring an ensemble of five characters that greets visitors at the beginning of the exhibition. The rest is a variation on the theme, from towering bronze-cast sculptures, patinated to look like plastic, to pen drawings and acrylic paintings.
The show never deepens beyond the merchandizing appeal of repackaging familiar forms. Are we supposed to be excited by the juxtaposition of sneakers and paintings, whose joint presentation tells us only that KAWS has beaten the system by having it both ways? Family’s emphasis on these corporate partnerships suggests that something doesn’t need to have the presumed integrity of fine art to be museum worthy as long as it succeeds as an art-adjacent product. And the product itself is all pastiche, an orgy of postmodern signifiers, potentially charming because of our familiarity with these characters, but devoid of any real commentary on pop culture or capitalism.
Donnelly himself has admitted that the work he does now has “pretty much nothing to do with graffiti,” citing his engagement with high-end streetwear companies — and he clearly leans into this lineage of commercialism here. In one series that riffs on The Simpsons, titled Kimpsons, the paintings are presented not in frames, but rather plastic blister packs, like action figures for sale at Walmart. Another gallery is lined with cereal boxes that he designed for General Mills in 2022. It’s impossible to see them and not be reminded of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes — but where Warhol was critiquing mass production, Donnelly was actively participating. A white gold and diamond-encrusted necklace commissioned by rapper Kid Cudi bears a striking resemblance to Damien Hirst’s “For the Love of God.” The similarity brought to mind Hirst’s comment, in a 2007 interview with BBC One, that “as an artist you always make work from what’s around you, and money was around me.”
The show represents of a decline in aesthetics infecting the fine arts in San Francisco and elsewhere under the rise of “red-chip” art — essentially, work that appeals to tech and finance bros in its kitschy, apparently harmless aesthetics and role in the market as a status symbol and pump-and-dump stock, an asset with an artificially inflated value — in this case, the perception that these objects are sound art investments. Other artists who cater to this movement include a roster of white dudes like Beeple, Alex Israel, and Alec Monopoly, all genuflecting at the altar of Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami. While the originators of the movement still worked within traditional gallery systems, the new guard has largely skirted the white-cube art world in favor of other lucrative avenues. At least until now. A fascinating museum show could be found in mining the critical question of how and why red-chip art has risen to soaring heights of popularity at this particular political moment. Yet KAWS: Family fails to take any sort of interrogative position, simply treating KAWS as a fact of contemporary fine art.
That’s because the decision makers at the museum know they don’t have to try. The show is bound to be wildly popular; the line on opening day already stretched around the block as I left the press preview. Adult tickets clock in at $42, though a visit to the gift shop, which, in typical KAWS fashion, occupies the last gallery in the exhibition, is clearly part of the intended experience. “Why” isn’t a relevant question when money talks louder.
Maybe another museum will take on the challenge of presenting a case study on the collapse of culture at the hands of commodity. In the meantime, by hosting this show, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (where government arts grants make the commercial aspect less salient), SFMOMA has chosen to prioritize its own bottom line as it caters to both tourists and the tech bros who seem to be San Francisco’s current taste makers, rather than investing in art’s true potential.
This institutional capitulation to the market forces driving the techno gilded age is disappointing in the least, dangerous at worst. We’re left only to surmise that good art is a liability in a world driven by capitalism. Instead, we get the benign, vacant monument to commerce that is KAWS — so palatable that it’s sickening.
KAWS: Family continues at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (151 Third Street, San Francisco, California) through May 3, 2026. The exhibition was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and curated by Julian Cox of the AGO. The SFMOMA presentation was curated by Daryl McCurdy, with William Hernandez Luege.
