By Charly SHELTON

In 2017, pop-up museums were all the rage. Museum of Ice Cream. Museum of Failure. Happy Place. 29 Rooms. All these places that you see on Instagram only to find that tickets sold out three months before the doors opened. These limited time traveling museums and art installations are only for those in-the-know and totally Instagrammable, but not usually accessible to the majority of Angelenos due to the limited space and lack of advertising on non-social-media platforms. Lucky for you, CV Weekly was invited to a pop-up art installation last month to give you a taste of these museums that you didn’t even know you were missing.

29 Rooms is an annual pop-up art installation by Refinery 29, a women’s blog on art, style, news and more. Each of the 29 Rooms is a different art experience from a different artist, usually promoting a different product or movie/show. Not all of the installations are promotional, but so many of them were that I got the feeling I was living in an advertisement. For example, The New World – in collaboration with Toyota – invited guests to “Step inside this immersive, surrealist world and experience how it feels to drive the thrilling, all-new 2018 Camry.” World of Daisy, in collaboration with Marc Jacobs – which just looks like a magazine ad for the perfume that guests can sit in – asks guests, “What if a world of blue sky and never-ending fields was only a bottle of Daisy Marc Jacobs away?”

Or there is The Trophy Room, in collaboration with Margot Robbie to promote upcoming film “I, Tonya,” or One Woman, Many Crowns, brought to you by Netflix’s “The Crown,” or the Flavor Chambers brought to you by Perrier, or The Power Parlor brought to you by Demi Lovato. I could go on, but I don’t think I need to. These advertisements are perfect for Instagramming, incur wait times while models get their 50th take of a casual snapshot just right and usually come with a sample of the perfume or makeup or whatever it is.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it. I did. But I was expecting a real art installation with more of an emphasis on the art and less on self-promotion and blatant commercialism. Some of the unsponsored rooms – like Gender Neutral (a bathroom setting for commentary on acceptance of sexuality), Ocean of Creativity (an oceanscape made out of only found trash from beaches) and Tales We Tell (a wall of empty-paged books where guests can write whatever they want to, be it a confession, a poem or a short story) – were powerful and beautiful without attachments to anything else. Knowing it’s ars gratia artis makes it guilt-free whereas knowing something is an ad takes away from the museum quality that 29 Rooms was trying to engender.

In summation, 29 Rooms is an ad-filled wonderland of art that is camera-ready for Instagram and associated with the top brands. You can see most of these installations on Instagram or Twitter by searching their hashtags, but I hope that this article lets you see behind the curtain and feel like you were really there. This is, by no means, equal across the board for all pop-up museums and I would be interested to see some of the others. I don’t know where or when these things pop-up, but if I get a chance to go to another one, I would give it a shot.

Until then, I’m happy sticking to LACMA.

  Charly Shelton