Fresh may have just saved you a trip to the MoMA exhibit.
As someone who grew up with hip hop and experienced it firsthand, going to the exhibit was a somewhat unsettling experience. The majority of the visitors were older, wealthy Manhattanites mixed in with the occasional teacher-led group of grade school students. The type of people who, at best, had only a passing familiarity with the material that was being presented. I imagine what I felt while I was walking through the exhibit was not unlike that of someone who lives near a tourist attraction, watching people take a momentary, disposable interest in what I live every day. More than once I had to resist the urge to lecture people about everything that wasn’t covered. That, undoubtedly, is one of the reasons why this exhibit did not resonate with me; I went into it expecting to see things I had never seen before or at least see things presented in a way that I had never considered them, a visual equivalent of The Big Payback perhaps, but instead found myself staring at things that, to any hip hop head, were fairly routine.
